Filipe Espósito (Reddit):
Both macOS 15 and iOS 18 introduce iPhone Mirroring, which is a new way of interacting with your iPhone from your Mac. The feature lets you see and control your iPhone screen from your computer without having to touch your phone. You can also drag and drop files between macOS and the mirrored iPhone.
At least in beta 1, this feature is not available.
Wayne G:
iPhone Mirroring steps things up considerably, allowing you to use your phone, see notifications, and use your apps—all from your Mac desktop. Because this is a Continuity feature, it does require that your iPhone be on the same WiFi network as your Mac and have Bluetooth enabled.
When you launch iPhone mirroring, your iPhone’s Home Screen appears in a window on the Mac desktop. From there you can use your keyboard and mouse/trackpad to navigate the phone, swiping between Home Screen pages, and launching and browsing apps.
I’m really looking forward to this, both so that I can access my phone when it’s locked and so that I can fly through tasks with the keyboard and mouse that would be awkward on the touch screen. Universal Clipboard helps but doesn’t go far enough.
Matthias Gansrigler:
iPhone Mirroring. Aka “I can finally post to Instagram from my Mac”
Matt Birchler:
Bezel has done something like this before, but Apple uses their elevated position as the platform owner to take this to the next level.
This looks sick and is really cleverly done. The thing that gets me most excited is the ability to have notifications appear on my Mac and not just on my iPhone. The fact that clicking on that notification opens that on my iPhone on my Mac’s display is just awesome. And again, since Apple has elevated powers here, the fact that your phone screen remains off while all this is happening is just a cherry on top.
I can’t help but snark that Apple lets you use your iPhone with a mouse and everyone thinks it’s awesome, but touching a Mac remains beyond the pale and something only a fool would suggest 😉
Christina Warren:
So if I can control my phone from my Mac with a touchpad — wouldn’t it be cool if I could I dunno, control those apps on my Mac with a touch screen? What if I just got a touch screen on my Mac!
Previously:
Update (2024-06-24): M.G. Siegler:
iPhone Mirroring on macOS Sequoia still may be the star of the entire show to me.
Also, how about we do the same thing with Mac Mirroring on an iPad?
Previously:
Update (2024-06-25): Juli Clover:
With the second developer beta of macOS Sequoia, Apple has added support for iPhone Mirroring, one of the main updates coming to the Mac.
Update (2024-07-01): George Garside:
By default, the iPhone Mirroring window on macOS Sequoia appears at actual size and cannot be resized. The frame of the iPhone with iOS 18 is not draggable and the size of the iPhone cannot be enlarged. However, it is possible to make the window larger through a hidden setting.
Update (2024-07-25): Juli Clover:
With the fourth beta of macOS Sequoia that came out today, Apple added a useful new feature to iPhone Mirroring.
Aaron Pearce:
I do have one question around iPhone mirroring… can you have multiple iPhones?
Previously:
Update (2024-10-08): Sevco Security (via Hacker News):
Sevco discovered a major systemic privacy bug whereby the applications from a user’s personal iPhone may become part of the company’s software inventory via a new Apple feature known as “iPhone Mirroring.”
In short, the applications on an employee’s personal iPhone may be exposed to their corporate IT department.
Update (2024-10-09): Rui Carmo (MacRumors):
My initial thought when reading this was “this is just stupid”. Then I thought about the added complexity involved over just mirroring the display, and I thought it was probably a great idea UX-wise (on the lines of Continuity), but, in the end, I still think it’s a profoundly stupid implementation, for the following reasons[…]
Update (2024-11-06): Cabel Sasser:
Using iPhone Mirroring just to listen to the Nintendo Music app on my Mac is an incredibly good trick
And as a bonus, after shrinking it down, it ALMOST feels like I’ve got a weird Audion skin running
Update (2024-11-25): Stephen Hackett:
The addition of iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia is my favorite addition to the Apple ecosystem in years.
[…]
I — like everyone else — have some iPhone-only apps in my life that either aren’t available on my Mac, or run pretty poorly. Having them available from the machine I’m already working on is sweet.
Update (2024-12-02): Helge Heß:
I really love the idea of iPhone mirroring, and it somewhat works, sometimes. But the execution is not exactly great? Feels a little weird that this got released in this state.
In practice it gives me notifications only arriving on my iPhone and when I click them,
- my phone itself is on, stopping the process, or
- not nearby (though still in the same WLAN) or
- sth else
which doesn’t actually make the mirror app to successfully connect. Disappointing, because I’d like that. No resizing.
Bug Continuity Esoteric Preferences Instagram iOS iOS 18 iOS Apps on macOS iPhone Mirroring Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Notification Center Privacy
Apple:
People can customize the appearance of their app icons to be light, dark, or tinted. You can create your own variations to ensure that each one looks exactly the way you way you want. See Apple Design Resources for icon templates.
Design your dark and tinted icons to feel at home next to system app icons and widgets. You can preserve the color palette of your default icon, but be mindful that dark icons are more subdued, and tinted icons are even more so. A great app icon is visible, legible, and recognizable, even with a different tint and background.
Louie Mantia:
It appears to me that all white-glyph icons in dark mode use their background color as their foreground color. Mail’s white envelope becomes blue. The blue background becomes black. A blue envelope is a little weird, but it’s rendered as a symbol, unlike Wallet or Files, which have minor shading.
The white-background icons simply become black-background icons. Maps utilizes a dark mode color palette from the app itself, Weather turns the sky black, but oddly keeps the sun rather than switching to the moon. This could be a rule Apple enforces only for themselves, where their app icons won’t change shape, only coloration. The Photos petals are now additive color rather than subtractive.
Unfortunately, some icons appear to have lost or gained weight in dark mode. For example, the Settings gear didn’t change size in dark mode, but it appears to occupy less space because the dark circle around it blends with its background. That makes it appear smaller than the Find My icon, which now looks enormous next to FaceTime. This is a remnant of some questionable design choices in iOS 7 that have lingered now for the last decade.
[…]
Now, let’s walk through some icons I adapted into dark mode to see how we might tackle this new challenge.
Nick Heer:
I think it is safe to say a quality app from a developer that cares about design will want to supply a specific dark mode icon instead of relying upon the system-generated one. Any icon with more detail than a glyph on a background will benefit.
Also, now that there are two distinct appearances, I also think it would be great if icons which are very dark also had lighter alternates, where appropriate.
Ryan Jones:
These tinted icons are… something.
Includes a Large icon option. 🫣
Matt Birchler:
On Android, app developers need to submit their icons in a specific way to make them available for theming like this. If an app developer doesn’t do this and just has an image file for an icon, then they won’t get themed. What this ends up meaning is that icons that are set up for theming look great and those that are not stick out like a sore thumb.
[…]
iOS 18 takes a different approach, in that it will change every single icon for you, no matter what. This removes the case above where apps like Letterboxd and Readwise Reader don’t support theming, but in my view, also makes it so that every icon looks pretty bad.
Previously:
Update (2024-06-18): United States Graphics Company:
Icons as they are supposed to be.
The whole point of icons is to identify and differentiate using semiotics, not assimilate as a sleek monochromatic slop of washed out minimalism.
See also: Eli Schiff.
Update (2024-06-19): Craig Grannell:
Still floored that the new iOS 18 iPhone Home Screen gives you four different options for how your icons can look, at two different sizes, but no sorting options. Apple execs must like busywork and fiddling around, rather than efficiency.
At least it will be easier to rearrange them using a mouse with iPhone Mirroring.
Remo_Pr0:
Wait if every app icon must have a dark mode and tintable icon then what would happen to additional app icons? Now in apps like for example
@marvis_app
there must be two extra icons for every additional style?
Via Eli Schiff:
Apple in their new theming paradigm makes redundant the functionality they made available a few years ago to allow devs to include custom icons. Oh, they still let you supply them. But they’ll just stick out.
Eli Schiff:
There is a reason designers have never done monotone blend modes/maps on top of their icons. They don’t look good. We can see here in this example. Just look at the two on the left. But now that Apple’s forced the matter somehow people say mono looks good.
Update (2024-06-24): John Brayton:
If an app has several icon options that vary only by color combination, it seems natural to let the user choose one option for light mode and another for dark mode. But there is no way to do this without providing n2 app icon entries in the asset catalog. It also seems like the tinted icon should be the same for each option when they only vary by color combination. But the only way for several icon options to use the same tinted variant is to copy the same PNG into each app icon asset catalog entry.
My ideal solution to this would be a new setAlternateIconName method on UIApplication that accepted 3 different parameters: a light mode icon name, a dark mode icon name, and a tinted icon name.
Update (2024-07-09): Sebastiaan de With:
iOS 18 beta 3 seems to be doing an intelligent auto-dark tint on some third party app icons. It’s reliably triggered by being a clearly delineated shape on a white background. Other icons just get a slight ‘darkening’ effect applied.
BUT! check out that Facebook icon invert. Some kind of computational icon design happening here. Wild.
Sebastiaan de With:
it’s super interesting to me how iOS 18b3 inverts colored icons: it seems to grab icons with a flat color or 90° gradient and somehow turns the main shape into a mask to cut out its previous background gradient?
Android Dark Mode Design Icons iOS iOS 18 Springboard.app
macOS 15 upgrade managed to delete my local Photos library. Since I don’t have iCloud Photos enabled on that mac, all local photos are gone now. well.
Federico Viticci:
The Photos app is getting a big redesign in iOS 18 that is surely going to take some time getting used to. The new design revolves around a single-page UI that eschews a tab bar in favor of a split-screen approach with your grid of photos shown at the top, followed by a series of collections that encompass both traditional albums, previous categories such as ‘People and Pets’ and Memories, as well as new sections such as Trips and Recent Days.
The best way to think about this redesign – which I’m sure will be debated a lot this summer – is that everything can now be considered a “collection” that you can pin for quick access to the top of the Photos UI. The top of the interface is still taken up by the regular photo grid (which you can more easily filter for content now), but that part can also be scrolled horizontally to swipe between the grid and other collections. For example, you can swipe from the grid of recents to, say, featured photos, your favorites, or any other collections you want to pin there.
[…]
It’s a lot to take in at once, and this new design can be quite daunting at first. I understand that Apple wants to try a unified design for the Photos app to put a stronger emphasis on rediscovering memories, but I wonder if maybe packing too much information all at once on-screen could be disorienting for less proficient users. The new Photos design almost feels like an exercise in showing off what Apple can build with SwiftUI just because they can; time will tell if users will also appreciate that.
The new Photos interface reminds me of the TV and Music stores, which are among my least favorite Apple designs. I never want to see horizontal scrolling.
Ryan Christoffel:
Photos in iOS 18 now puts all your content on a single screen. Similar to the Journal app introduced last year, the entirety of Photos navigation is done in a single screen that you scroll through to find all your content.
That’s it. One screen, scroll up and down, scroll side to side for carousels—everything in the app lives there.
I suppose I should reserve judgement until I try it, but this sounds dreadful.
Juli Clover:
These changes to Photos are in iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia as well as iOS 18.
The Mac version does still have a sidebar.
Benjamin Mayo:
iOS 18 Photos app is weird. It’s like they tried to simplify it, but in reality it is now more complicated. No tab bar means there’s nothing to permanently ground navigation.
Ryan Jones:
iOS 18 Photos app is NOT going to go over well.
Waaaaaaay too little org hierarchy.
iOS 18 Photos == iOS 15 Safari
Steve Troughton-Smith:
If the new Photos app is the new poster child for ‘rewritten in SwiftUI’, hoo-boy…
Previously:
Update (2024-06-18): CTD:
Still very surprising and longstanding omissions in iOS and iPadOS Photos including no support for viewing or adding keywords. No Smart Albums.
Update (2024-07-02): See also: Brandon Butch and Trevor.
Update (2024-07-08): Chance Miller:
Billy Sorrentino, senior director at Apple’s human interface design team, explained the motivation behind this dramatic redesign.
“As our features, users and libraries have grown, so has the density of the [Photos] app. So rather than hunt and peck throughout, we’ve created a simple streamlined single view photos experience based on deep intelligence,” Sorrentino explained. “Ultimately, we wanted to remove friction.”
[…]
“Lots of deep intelligence combined with customization means that Photos can be more personal,” Apple’s Della Huff, manager of the camera and photos product marketing team, explained. “Everyone has a different workflow and so automatic customisation is really key here.”
Emphasis added.
Frank Rausch:
It’s a typical modern UI: You don’t get to form a fitting mental model / cognitive map of how the app is structured and how it works; instead you react to whatever pops up on screen and tap to see what happens.
Mario Guzmán:
This is the current state of app design. And I hate it. Also, what makes it more frustrating is that the old HIG used to have a section on mental models.
But it feels like prominent apps like Photos get redesigned so often that even if you adapt your mental models around the app, you’ll have to re-adapt again shortly because they will be introducing a whole new design soon.
I also hate that it is “Suggestions-first” rather than let me just go to where I need to go to.
Mario Guzmán:
For any designer who has lost their way… here is some information on Metaphors and Mental Models when designing your app’s UX from the original Mac Human Interface Guidelines. I hope this helps.
Federico Viticci (Mastodon):
It’s been a few weeks since I installed iOS 18 on my primary iPhone, and I feel pretty confident in saying this: I was wrong about the new Photos app at first.
I’ll reserve more in-depth comments for the public beta and final release of iOS 18; of course, given the drastic redesign of the app, there’s also a chance Apple may scrap their plans and introduce a safer update with fewer structural changes. However, over the past few weeks, I noticed that not only do I find myself discovering more old photos in iOS 18, but the modular approach of the more customizable Photos app really works for me. I was able to fine-tune the top carousel to my liking, and I customized pinned collections with shortcuts to my favorite sections. Put simply, because of these changes, I use the Photos app a lot more and find navigating it faster than before.
John Gordon:
Things are bad when Apple execs bother to say anything about Photos.app
In my hallucinations the EU forces Apple to make PhotoKit a full platform for third parties to replace Photos.mac with their own product.
Update (2024-07-15): D. Griffin Jones:
With the major Photos app redesign coming in iOS 18, Apple aims for simplicity. However, the version of the Photos app in iOS 18 developer beta 3 is a hodge-podge of design that will confuse users. I think that if Apple doesn’t revise its approach, the company will face significant backlash when it releases the updated app to the public this fall.
Update (2024-07-16): Steve Troughton-Smith:
The new Photos app in iOS 18 just doesn’t do it for me; in fact, I can’t stand the changes they’ve made to the UI and navigation. I am firmly in the camp that feels the photo library is a feature, a utility to be used by other apps. Apple, however, wants Photos to be a destination, a product with a unique UI, flashy features and user retention gimmicks. Whether these two things should be two different apps, I don’t know, but what we’ve got here isn’t an app I want to have my photos in anymore.
It’s worth saying: none of this would be a problem if the Photos app were a user-replaceable component like antitrust regulators in the EU desire. I could just replace the Photos app, which is clearly going off in a direction I want nothing to do with, with an alternative that looks and functions like the old one.
Jason Snell:
I 100% understand the impulse and think it might be forgivable if you could dismiss the other thing and keep it gone, but I can’t get over the whole thing where you launch into the MIDDLE of a scrollable area with different destinations up, down, and (sort of) to the right. It’s bananas.
Machiel:
There is no sense of place. You are lucky if it shows you what you want to see because good luck finding it yourself. Good luck organizing.
There is no way to manage photos properly with this design.
Collin Donnell:
A lot of modern Apple apps on macOS are really lacking in the keyboard shortcuts department. Apple Photos are Freeform are two big ones for me.
Update (2024-07-18): Tuomas Hämäläinen:
One of the things that bothers me about the new Photos app is the heavy emphasis on the system picking a photo or a set of photos to represent a particular collection of items. It makes me feel like I’m not in control, like I might just miss the thing I’m looking for because the system has decided what to highlight and what to downplay. It looks fancy but doesn’t fit the way my brain works. Give me all the items in a regular grid so I can scan visually like I’m used to.
Update (2024-08-07): Steve Troughton-Smith:
I'm really not looking forward to teaching my parents how the new Photos app works and telling them 'no you can’t have the old one back’, ‘no I don't like it either’ 😑
Federico Viticci:
Well, I sure am glad I didn’t pre-write the Safari and Photos chapters of my iOS 18 review.
In today’s iOS 18 beta 5, Safari now comes with a ‘Distraction Control’ feature to hide website elements; Photos’ new design loses the carousel at the top and has other tweaks.
Chance Miller:
One of the big changes to the Photos app in iOS 18 was the addition of a new Carousel view. This view allowed users to swipe left and right to view highlights that updated each day and featured favorite people, pets, places, and more. However, with iOS 18 beta 5, this feature has been removed entirely from the Photos app.
Apple says iOS 18 beta 5 also tweaks the “All Photos” view to display more of the photos grid, without the user having to swipe down. The new “Recent Days” feature also now includes “Recently Saved” content, both of which previously existed separately.
Finally, Apple says that iOS 18 beta 5 adjusts where albums are located for people with multiple albums. The Photos app continues to be fully customizable, and users can rearrange sections and categories as they see fit.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The base level of UI in Photos in iOS 18 beta 5 is a little bit better. But it still has janky scrolling and scroll cancellation that makes it a pain to transition between the grid and what lies beneath. Scroll up and down and watch it rubberband and stutter and glitch about to see what I mean. Navigate a level deeper into anything and it’s just as bad as before, though. It’s even more awful than I would have expected a SwiftUI rewrite of a major system app to be, and my expectations are low.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-14): Juli Clover:
This guide aggregates everything different with the iOS 18 Photos app, and it is up to date with Apple’s latest changes.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Photos in iOS 18b6 has improved to ‘unpleasant, but tolerable’, at least once you turn off basically everything. I don’t like the scrolling main screen, and I don’t like that albums dismiss on scroll, but you can turn off enough of it now to make it work
Update (2024-09-12): Justin Bianco:
I’ve been using iOS 18 for a few weeks now and the Photos app is interesting but scrolling is a joke. I constantly dismiss an album when I’m trying to scroll through it, if I scroll too far sometimes I get an auto playing slideshow movie, and the whole thing feels like using an over-designed, scroll-jacked website. Navigation just doesn’t feel linear or hierarchical anymore and I hate it.
Mario Guzmán:
Everything about this post is what I experience too. I’m constantly accidentally exiting out of an album because my finger meaning to scroll vertically is slightly slanted and takes it as a horizontal swipe. This is by far the most frustrating Photos app.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
I really hope Apple has learned something useful by rewriting Photos in SwiftUI, but I would still go back to the old app in a heartbeat
Update (2024-09-17): Jason Snell:
I’ve spent the summer working on a new edition of my book about Photos and so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what Apple’s trying to do here.
[…]
So the new version of Photos doesn’t launch to the Library view, with a bunch of tabs at the bottom that apparently few people clicked on. Instead, it launches to a new hybrid view (thankfully simplified and tweaked since the original iOS beta earlier this summer) that displays the familiar Library grid in the top two-thirds of the screen, with a series of Collections in the bottom third. When you scroll up, you’re in classic Library view. When you scroll down, you’re seeing the multitude of ways that Photos can automatically carve up and re-serve you the contents of your Library in ways that make sense and are pleasing.
I know that these changes made a lot of people cranky this summer, but I think the app ended up in a great place. Sure, if you are someone whose idea of using Photos is to launch it and only see the very latest items, I guess this update adds clutter. And Apple should probably let people say “I don’t want to launch in this view” and honor that request. But for the vast majority of iPhone users, Collections are a boon, a way in to your library that offers major improvements over long scrolls through the Library.
[…]
The Mac is updated too, but there’s no real interface overhaul—you can get to Collections via the Sidebar, as always.
Update (2024-09-20): Dan Moren:
The redesign has taken some time to get used to, but after a few months with it I’ve found I really do appreciate the changes for the most part.
Federico Viticci:
I was wrong about the new Photos at first. Having used iOS 18’s Photos app every day since June, not only do I think Apple managed to invent a new design paradigm for SwiftUI-based, library-centric apps on iOS, but they’ve also created an app that is going to help people rediscover old memories more effectively and serendipitously than before.
Update (2024-09-25): Scott Hanselman:
The new ios18 photos app is just awful. Does exactly the opposite of everything I need it to do in the most unintuitive way possible.
John Gordon:
iOS 18: took me 20 minutes of use to crash Photos.app on iOS 18.0
[…]
Looks like iOS 18 photos can’t handle large numbers of albums. Apple needs to pay me to test their crap.
Tim Hardwick:
While this new layout aims to streamline navigation, you may want to tailor it to your preferences. Here's how you can customize and reorder collections in the new Photos app.
Dave Mark:
I am constantly confused by the new Photos app layout. Years and years of muscle memory thrown to the wayside.
This article really helps, PLUS it’s good to know how to customize the layout.
Update (2024-11-11): Marcin Krzyzanowski:
my iPad has almost 20 cm width, yet all buttons are crumbled in a corner with 1mm space between them, with spaces that makes it impossible to touch the right button with human sized fingers
Update (2024-12-05): Tanner Bennett:
There used to be a private setting to revert the photos app back to how it looked before iOS 18. I hope Apple is seeing all this feedback and makes that setting public. This is worse than the Safari redesign by far.
Update (2024-12-06): Matt Growcoot (via Ric Ford):
While users can’t take their Photo app back to the iOS 17 way of doing things, there is a way of changing it on iOS 18.
Update (2024-12-23): Juli Clover:
There’s no returning to what the Photos app used to be unless Apple decides to roll back the changes, but there are a few tweaks that can be made to make it easier to get used to the new layout.
Design iOS iOS 18 iPadOS iPadOS 18 Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Photos.app SwiftUI
As far as I can tell, there were no Catalyst sessions this year. Apple hasn’t talked about it much since 2021.
The Mac developer page says:
Choose your app-builder technology
Another early choice to make is which app-builder technology to use for your interface. Apple’s app-builder technologies provide the core infrastructure macOS needs to communicate with your app. They also define the programming model you use to build your interface, handle events, and more.
The two technologies listed are SwiftUI and AppKit, with SwiftUI preferred. There is still a navigation bar item for Mac Catalyst, but I’m not sure Apple itself is using it much except for the apps like Messages and Home that it already ported. I wonder whether those will become SwiftUI in time. Initially, Catalyst sounded like a transition technology, but, as with Carbon, Apple didn’t paint it that way. Some in the iOS developer community like it. It started out with a lot more functionality than SwiftUI. But I don’t hear developers talk about it that much anymore, and Apple doesn’t seem to be using it for new apps. Freeform for Mac uses AppKit and nibs (along with SwiftUI). Journal curiously remains iOS-only.
Michael Love:
Catalyst appears to be dead, more-or-less.
Amber Neely:
Apple has announced a handful of new features coming to its Journal app this fall, but for reasons only it knows, the company hasn’t announced any plans to bring it to iPad.
Jesse Squires:
The iOS Journal app improvements look great.
Still a mystery why it is not available on iPad or Mac.
Even if it’s just catalyst or otherwise not customized for the other platforms, it would still be incredibly useful as is.
But instead, I’m going to be using iPhone Mirroring to use the journal app on my Mac. And that just seems so fucking dumb and absurd.
Previously:
Update (2024-06-14): See also: Steve Troughton-Smith.
Update (2024-06-18): Thomas Ricouard:
The last time Catalyst was ever mentioned at a WWDC was in 2021 lol.
Colin Cornaby:
I think what killed Catalyst is what’s slowly killing UIKit everywhere - it’s not flexible enough to adapt to multiple platforms. Does Vision Pro support UIKit? Sure. Is UIKit a good way to write Vision Pro apps? No. It’s not just the Mac. Across the board UIKit is generally not adapting well to other platforms. All the platforms support UIKit - and generally it’s half baked on all of them except iOS.
That’s not to say SwiftUI doesn’t have its own problems - but it’s still much more quickly adapting itself to new platforms. I don’t know if visionOS would be as easy to develop for without SwiftUI.
Update (2024-06-20): Marcin Krzyzanowski:
The way UITextView is broken on Catalyst, is beyond imagination. It is just plain broken editing.
Update (2024-08-08): pmdj:
I guess my forum question comes down to this: Is Mac Catalyst considered a platform for building macOS apps in its own right? Or are we “holding it wrong” and should we only treat it as a way of tweaking Mac ports of iOS/iPad-first apps? Should we expect APIs to disappear from the Mac Catalyst SDK with zero notice?
Quinn:
Regarding these XPC APIs, you are right that APIs shouldn’t just disappear without warning. […] I had a look at your bug and it’s clear that this was a mistake.
[…]
Regarding Mac Catalyst as a whole, Apple rarely makes forward-looking statements about our platforms, but this is a rare exception to that rule. Watch WWDC 2022 Session 102 Platforms State of the Union, and specifically Josh’s section starting at 3:43.
[…]
I’m not a UI programmer at heart. That’s why I’m a big fan of SwiftUI. With SwiftUI I can cons up a basic interface and have it run natively on both iOS and macOS, without having to worry about the limitations of Mac Catalyst.
Update (2024-08-09): Aaron Pearce:
When you still have to build your own toolbar library to fix Mac Catalyst UI bugs, it says a lot about how little Catalyst has improved.
Matt Gallagher:
This looks like it’s a MacCatalyst limitation. I might need to file a feedback: app-defined commands should be allowed to override the commands that MacCatalyst injects automatically.
Aaron Pearce:
Yeah, sadly I’m stuck with Catalyst due to decisions by Apple to only allow HomeKit access via that means…
There’s also a Catalyst-only API that I’d like to use, but that’s probably asking for trouble.
Update (2024-08-17): Aaron Pearce:
Trying to build a first class Mac app via Catalyst just seems demotivating right now. So many small bugs that should have been fixed after so many versions of macOS.
I feel like I’ve spent the last few weeks investing in workarounds to simple UI bugs caused by Catalyst.
The next step would be to invest even more time into a solution to let me mostly use HomeKit via native AppKit/SwiftUI. Only HomeCam wouldn’t get to use this as the camera view is UIKit based.
Calculator Catalyst (Marzipan) Cocoa Freeform iOS iOS 18 iPadOS iPadOS 18 Journal Mac macOS 15 Sequoia SwiftUI WWDC XPC
Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News):
But up until now, you haven’t been able to sign into iCloud using macOS on a VM. This made the feature less useful for developers or users hoping to test iCloud features in macOS, or whose apps rely on some kind of syncing with iCloud, or people who just wanted easy access to their iCloud data from within a VM.
Or even to run an app from the Mac App Store.
This limitation is going away in macOS 15 Sequoia, according to developer documentation that Apple released yesterday. As long as your host operating system is macOS 15 or newer and your guest operating system is macOS 15 or newer, VMs will now be able to sign into and use iCloud and other Apple ID-related services just as they would when running directly on the hardware.
Great news, but the version restrictions mean it will be most useful after the next WWDC.
Apple (via Hacker News):
Nested virtualization is available for Mac with the M3 chip, and later.
This means running a VM inside of a VM.
Marcin Krzyzanowski:
macOS virtual machine allows to install macOS AND USE ICLOUD
That is 99% what you need to have viable macOS simulator.
Miles Wolbe:
“Using a macOS 15 installer to upgrade an older VM doesn’t provide support for iCloud.”
Sadly, signing in to the App Store does not appear to be supported (for now?), returning “An unknown error occurred.”
Previously:
Update (2024-06-18): Howard Oakley:
This article explains the changes promised in macOS Sequoia as a host, and their consequences on VMs.
[…]
In previous versions of macOS, VMs have been unable to access most storage except in the VM’s own disk image or through shared folders. With Sequoia they will now be able to access USB storage through the UUID of the storage device. This should provide direct access to external disks, and any other external storage connected to the host via USB.
[…]
For those with Macs with Ultra chips and ample cores, there’s no indication that Apple has relaxed its licence to allow any more than two macOS VMs to be run at the same time.
Apple ID Apple M3 Apple M3 Max Apple M3 Pro Developer Tool iCloud Mac Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia Simulator Virtualization
