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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.
So how has this worked out for Windows so far?
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.
#DeleteFacebook
And Launchpad that came long before - looks just like the iOS home screen. The move to the same filesystem as iOS (APFS). The addition of a secure enclave chip to the iMac Pro. Internet recovery. All points to an eventual merged platform.
Remember the failure of the Amphi-car? it was neither a very good boat nor a very good car...
This is how I see apps that are trying to be all things .. phones / tablets / desktops have very different UIs ..and for good reason.
Play to each platforms strengths.. Microsoft tried to do this with its windows store Universal Plaform stuff and well, I can't speak for anyone else, but even on my Surface pro, I never run those "apps" .. I use it like a PC.. keyboard and touchpad/mouse
The Digital Sorceress
Separating content from presentation, graceful degradation, etc have very strong unix roots. It was in the context of character terminals interacting with graphical displays, but still, nroff, troff, LaTeX, TeX, original HTML are all really markup languages interpreting data appropriately for the devices that consume them.
So done correctly, it could work
Apple has a track record of doing it right. So it could work for Apple, though a similar attempt by Microsoft was pathetic.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
Better known as 318230.
Scaling is a big problem for iOS. When Apple made the Mac, they Did It Right. Both MacOS and OS X are DPI-aware (dots per inch). When you plug a monitor into the Mac, it queries the monitor for the model, looks it up in a database to determine the screen size Then it takes the display resolution, divides it by the screen size to calculate a PPI (pixels per inch). Then scales the UI elements appropriately. Apple originally had to develop this for their Postscript laser printer way back in the 1980s. They integrated it into the Mac so when page layout artists were working on a Mac, an 11 point font on the screen was exactly the same physical size as when it was printed out.
That's why the Macs had no problem with switching to the high-PPI Retina displays, while Windows still has lots of problems with 3k and 4k screens. Windows isn't aware of your screen's size and DPI, OS X is. Microsoft fixed this with Windows 8, so the system fonts, icons, and menus scale (based on a % you set, not on the screen's physical size). But apps which don't use the system fonts and menus don't benefit from this. That's why the UI in Adobe's apps are microscopic when you run them on Windows on a 4k screen. Adobe eschewed Windows' built-in menu system to build their own (probably so they could implement tear-off menu bars). That's why when you try to run an older Windows app with any scaling other than 100%, the fonts look blurry - Windows is simply rescaling the bitmap of the font, instead of substituting a correctly-scaled font which takes advantage of subpixel rendering.
Then Apple made probably their biggest blunder with iOS. They ditched this tremendously successful DPI-aware model, and made iOS dependent on a fixed resolution and screen size. Apparently Steve drank too much of his own kool-aid and decided since 3.5" with a 4:3 aspect ratio was the "perfect" screen size and There Would Never Be any other screen size, iOS didn't need to be DPI-aware. That's why they stuck with the original 3.5" screen for so long, why when they did increase the resolution they did it by doubling the DPI, and when they increased the screen size they initially did it by stretching the screen (adding more to the top/bottom). Because that was the only way to do it without breaking the UI of older apps. This is most apparent in the iPad Mini - it uses the same resolution as the iPad, but on a smaller screen. Resulting in everything it displays being smaller than on a regular iPad. They could add scaling to iOS now, but it would be like the situation with Windows and every app in the App Store would need to be re-written to be DPI-aware.
Ironically, Android is DPI-aware. Google didn't know the sizes of the Android devices manufacturers would make, so they had to make Android DPI-aware. A lot of Android apps ignore it, but the setting is in there. When properly used, the icons and fonts on Android are the same size whether you run the app on a phone or a tablet. And unlike the Mac where it's fixed depending on your monitor size, you can override it in Android. When I got a tablet for my elderly parents, I rooted it and set the DPI as if the screen size were 33% smaller than it really was. That had the effect of automatically making all of Android's icons and fonts 1.5x bigger, which really helped my parents use the tablet.
Every iOS app has been able to query the UIScreen object for its scale and size in points. What apps do with that is up to the developer. I know that it's not exactly the same as PPI, nor DPI, but it serves well enough.
A few years ago, Apple replaced its Mac OS iPhoto app with Photos. This removed a lot of functionality in order to have a more consistent experience between Mac and iPhone photo apps.
If that's the future of more Mac OS apps, I'm not looking forward to it.