Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
The most direct benefit of the Marzipan project will be to make life easier for the millions of developers who write software for Apple’s devices. For example, later this year Netflix Inc. would be able to more easily offer a Mac app for watching video by converting its iPad app. By 2021, Twitter Inc., which has mostly abandoned the Mac, could publish a single app for all Apple customers.
And:
Despite the app merger plan, Apple has said it won’t combine iOS and macOS into a single operating system.
This latest bit on Marzipan is all according to “people familiar with the plan”.
The ability to create a single code base, with interface adjustments for all the various screen sizes (which developers do now), does seem a boon for developers.
It’ll be interesting to see how Apple accommodates the variety of input devices and the difference in targeting sizes (difference between touch with a fat finger, and precise clicks via a mouse).
Im unsure of this. It’s one thing to change layout between iOS devices (and auto layout etc helps with that) but a Mac app and an iOS app live in very different paradigms.
For example, launch the Home app on the Mac. Find a dimmer switch or another thing that you adjust continuously between 2 endpoints. It represents as a thermometer control. On iOS, this makes sense. You touch and drag up or down and the thermometer level moves up or down. That paradigm fails on the Mac for the most part since it’s not a touch device. It’s not a matter of adjusting the control, it’s flat out not the best control for the job on MacOS.
This is likely true going the other way, too, where a macOS app that assumes a mouse and keyboard will have the wrong controls for a touch device. If Apple doesn’t have clear, high quality human interface guidelines and enforce them, this will… not go well.
So in the future, all Mac apps will have UIs designed with touch screens in mind. Instead of tabbing to a text field and typing the date, you’ll have to spin an odometer-style widget using a flywheel controlled with the mouse until the correct date shows up in the viewport.
Awesome. Supreme victory of style over usability, which is what the modern Apple is all about.
I hope it’s better than what we’ve seen in Mojave. Because what we’ve seen is lousy. I really believed Apple years ago when it said it’d never try to pull a Windows 8 and mash together two interfaces into something that feels more compromised than versatile. But the early returns aren’t inspiring.
Does this qualify as another rumor? 😉
Awful headline, though.
“API that lets you make an app to run on any of them” does not imply, as the headline does, “that will be the only kind of app you can make”.
Or, only Marzipan apps, not “all Mac apps”.
Why do people always assume “this new API lets people do thing X” means “everything has to use it and nothing else can be done”?