If you missed last week’s had a pretty interesting scoop that he’d been sitting on re mouse support coming to iPad as an accessibility feature. You will just drop that feature rather than rewriting the UI. Then you want or need to add a feature that’s not supported. However, Marizpan will surely have consequences that were not a goal but that nonetheless follow inevitably from its introduction.įor sure, but what I’m mostly concerned about is the “hybrid side-effect”: so you fear AppKit and you do your app in UIKit because “easymode”. They simply don’t have that goal in mind.
In any case, in my discussions with people at Apple, it seems UIKit is not designed to replace AppKit, or even be used by skilled Mac developers. But we’ll see for sure in 40 days.Ĭurrently, it doesn’t even seem like they are unifying the types.Īnd my theory that AppKit = Carbon seems to be if anything understating what’s about to happen Apple’s going to simply bring the interesting AppKit UI pieces to UIKit and deprecate the rest, by 2020 nobody will be writing AppKit apps anymore. Very disappointing that this apparently isn’t happening. When this was announced last year, I thought that was what they were doing. Makes me wonder whether ultimately it will be easier to provide a way to combine/embed UIKit and AppKit controls/windows, much the way Apple did with Carbon and Cocoa (over the course of a few years). That is, it will have to adopt so much (perhaps with revision, of course) that it does pretty much everything AppKit does. That’s not great for people who want to mix Marzipan and AppKit, or transition one way or the other.įor UIKit to become an app framework for Macs that makes great Mac apps, it will have to become AppKit. IF I take the Siri Shortcuts/Mac rumors at face value: Siri Shortcuts only being available to Marzipan apps implies that Marzipan still segmented from the Mac. Was pointed out to me that if Marzipan and AppKit are partitioned, that not only would Mac apps not get Shortcuts, but Marzipan apps wouldn’t get AppleScript.ĪppleScript doesn’t get a lot of attention these days but it’s invaluable to a lot of power user workflows. What will that mean for the separation between UIKit and AppKit world? The iOS SDK doesn’t include Mac frameworks like AppKit, AppleScript… So the ‘Marzipan SDK’ is just the iOS 13 SDK all along - a checkbox in your iOS project settings. The Mac situation seems unnecessary, and I think stems from a combination of vision (apply Apple’s favorite iOS ideas to the Mac) and neglect (no time/budget for Mac-only stuff). iOS was inevitably going to lose its simplicity due to competitive pressure. In some ways this is good, but both platforms also seem to be losing aspects of what made them great. If the majority of apps end up being designed for touch and limited by what UIKit can do, what difference does it make that it’s called macOS?Īpple has definitely been making iOS more like the Mac and macOS more like iOS.
But that’s not saying a whole lot if it ends up that he thinks the future of Mac apps is the same UIKit code running on a slightly different substrate. I tend to think he meant only that there won’t literally be a single OS that runs across Apple’s hardware lineup. Everyone is reading their own hopes and fears into it. It was intended as reassurance but isn’t, really, because it can mean just about anything.
My father is similarly non-technical and only uses a Mac and phone.Īpple’s VP of software engineering, Craig Federighi, answered the question of whether the company was working on merging iOS and macOS with a huge “No.” on stage at WWDC yesterday.įederighi’s “No” is to UIKit/AppKit/Marzipan as the word “modular” is to the new Mac Pro. Yet if she had to give up one or the other, she’d keep the Mac. My mother’s 2017 Mac is newer than her iPad Air, so her wallet is voting for the Mac, but she spends far more time on the iPad. Interesting point – the Apple community bubble assumes much about how the general public uses particular products, but how much of it is true?
Too bad Apple is no longer reporting unit sales. And given that iPad ISP is $422, have to conclude:Ģ) iPad is a device for people who wouldn’t otherwise buy a Mac (maybe cheap PCs?) The idea of iPad as a Mac replacement seems to be ideologically-driven by a vocal few. They’ll be mostly wasted on people buying the cheapest, smallest iPads. You could argue that Apple is wasting resources trying to put “Pro” features into iOS.