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Apple Plans Combined iPhone, iPad and Mac Apps To Create One User Experience (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Apple's iPhone and iPad introduced a novel way of interacting with computers: via easy-to-use applications, accessible in the highly curated App Store. The same approach hasn't worked nearly as well on Apple's desktops and laptops. The Mac App Store is a ghost town of limited selection and rarely updated programs. Now Apple plans to change that by giving people a way to use a single set of apps that work equally well across its family of devices: iPhones, iPads and Macs. Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it's running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter. Developers currently must design two different apps -- one for iOS, the operating system of Apple's mobile devices, and one for macOS, the system that runs Macs. With a single app for all machines, Mac, iPad and iPhone users will get new features and updates at the same time.
macOS and iOS use 2 different UI frameworks (CocoaTouch and UIKit, respectively). And this causes problems when trying to compile the source code between the two platforms. Ex: things like color and girth are defined specifically in each framework (NSFont and NSColor versus UIFont and UIColor). If they combine these frameworks, it makes the design and maintenance of cross platform software a lot easier (it'll still be difficult), and the at the very least, you wouldn't have to stub out a bunch of class names and files.
BUT - the most important work is still on the developer to ensure that their app runs great on iPhone, iPad and Mac and has a cohesive UI that scales and takes advantages of the different technologies. It's no different from Responsive Web Design or the shift from iPhone to iPad (and vice versa). Kudos to Apple for the courageous approach to their failure of an app store on desktop.
Which might explain the lack of updates for the MacBook Air and Mac mini: they're the ones that will transition first. Let's hope this also brings much lower price tags.
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I believe this is the reason Macbooks don't have touchscreens yet - Apple has been working on some way of bringing iOS UI / app compatibility to OSX for a full integration, but they haven't been able to pull it off from the software standpoint. Thus no touchscreen until that happens. Think about it... there are only three options for introducing a touchscreen. 1) Merely another input device, which won't work well at all because widgets are too small for touch interaction and none of the apps would support gestures, multi-touch, touch and hold, etc. 2) Yet another UI for touch interface somehow bootstrapped into OSX (make widgets bigger, make controls respond to dragging - IE what Microsoft did). 3) Integration of iOS and OSX in some hybrid way that brings the best of both into one device, and suddenly makes Macbooks way more appealing since they can run the massive library of iPad apps immediately.
You better believe that back in the Apple labs there are Macbooks with Apple ARM SOCs embedded in them (A11, etc) that can run iOS apps natively that have touchscreens, but they haven't managed to refine the OS UI to an acceptable point so far. This Slashdot story is a step in that direction, getting OSX developers on board and preparing their OSX apps for that environment. The iOS apps should be trivial - just need a touchscreen. iOS apps that can benefit from hardware keyboard, etc, already have that support anyway.
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> So how has this worked out for Windows so far?
It didn't work so well for Canonical Ubuntu either.
Maybe the lesson is that the phone and the desktop really are very different user experiences and really deserve different apps focused on the strengths of each respective environment.
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