Catalyst Deep Dive
Ars spoke with key members of the Apple team responsible for developing and promoting Project Catalyst at WWDC, as well as with a handful of app developers who have already made Mac apps this way. We asked them about how Catalyst works, what the future of Apple software looks like, and what users can expect.
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In other instances, developers can, of course, use conditional logic in their code to deliver different experiences and functionality based on which device the software is running on. Apple, however, intended for that approach to be reserved for cases where functionality is simply not available on a certain device but is desired on another.
“We’d like them to use conditionals as little as possible because, you know, conditionals are different code paths that you have to worry about,” explained Ozer. “And I think that the things we’ve tied to conditionals are APIs and features that are really very much Mac-only.”
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Still, Apple agreed that AppKit is the way to go for broad and deep Mac apps like those used by creative professionals and power users. Pruden said she believes Catalyst is about offering developers options but that teams creating powerful desktop apps will know whether it’s suitable for their products or not.
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To Pruden’s point, Benjamin believes there are fundamentally multiple types of apps, and they’re not mutually exclusive with one another on a platform. And this is key to understanding Apple’s approach, here.
To be clear, the Apple interviews did take place at WWDC. (MacStories seems to suggest that Apple participated in this story to do damage control after the fact.) Reason it was pubbed weeks later was that it took a long time to wrangle dev interviews after the Apple interviews.
Previously:
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
I'm very curious as to how Catalyst evolves between now and September. More particularly if many elements such as the date chooser aren't yet updated to be Maclike I hope it doesn't await next WWDC.
