{"id":25244,"date":"2019-05-13T15:32:05","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T19:32:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=25244"},"modified":"2019-05-13T16:36:27","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T20:36:27","slug":"what-to-expect-from-marzipan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/13\/what-to-expect-from-marzipan\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Expect from Marzipan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Craig Hockenberry<\/a> (tweet<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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It will be exciting for a lot of developers, including yours truly, to press that button. But it’s also important to temper this enthusiasm with reality: that build setting is just the first step on a long and complicated road. Good interaction doesn’t come for free.<\/p>\n

As you saw above, the Mac has seen a lot of tool and framework transitions. But this is the first transition which involves a large group of developers who don’t have any experience on the platform they’re targeting. A Mac developer moving from CodeWarrior and C++ to Project Builder and Objective-C didn’t have to learn anything new about conventions: they were still on a Mac. That can’t be said about iOS developers who are starting to use Marzipan.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Many of the thoughts in this essay got their start while developing a tvOS app: I found that having a common user interface toolkit wasn’t much help. It’s nice to have familiar UIKit items like UIImage<\/code>, UIColor<\/code>, and UIButton<\/code>, but in the end I found that little<\/em> code was shared between platforms. Some views could be ported directly between platforms, but anything involving a controller was out of the question.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Keeping two wildly different groups of customers happy with a single app won’t be an easy task, but it’s one that you’re going to be taking on with Marzipan.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It’s my opinion that Universal apps were the worst thing to ever happen for the iPad ecosystem. There’s no way for a developer to recoup the costs for new interactions and the extra work needed for more sophisticated apps. Apple makes it easier for a customer up front by offering a single download, but at the same time they make things worse because a Universal version of the user’s favorite app isn’t financially viable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Brent Simmons<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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As a Mac developer, you should do what other Mac developers do: understand and respect the platform and<\/em> get help from Mac users, power users, and fellow Mac developers.<\/p>\n

I’ve always found that Mac users are rooting for our success. They want us to make great apps — and they reward us for it. It’s a smaller, more intimate community, and warmer than iOS world. But you can also blow it by not trying, by not respecting the Mac and Mac users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Craig Hockenberry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Here’s a thread of some thoughts that didn’t make it into the post (it was already too long!)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Martin Pilkington<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I often feel that AppKit is under-appreciated by those who don’t have a lot of experience with it, and especially with switching back and forth between Mac and iOS development. To help try and fix that, I am going to go through some of the features in AppKit that don’t exist in UIKit. In this post I’ll cover the many controls of AppKit, and in a future post I’ll go into some of the less user-facing features.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dimitri Bouniol<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I feel like neither AppKit nor UIKit, nor a “declarative framework” that sits on top of either, depending on the platform, is really the right answer.<\/p>\n

AppKit is amazing in that it allows an app’s UI to easily match system conventions, but needs easy customizability badly.<\/p>\n

Similarly, UIKit offers a huge amount of flexibility to customize system components, and make new controls, but lacks the depth that AppKit has in terms of great defaults for a newly developed app.<\/p>\n

I feel like the ideal on both platforms would really be to have a cleaned up version of AppKit that offers the visual customizability of UIKit, but starts with an excellent set of defaults that any app should expect to have.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n