I think this is a good example of the HN bubble which is one of the only places where "native macOS app" means anything to anybody. At least something more than "oh, I need to have a Macbook for that?"

My girlfriend is a UX professional that does most of her work in Sketch. She doesn't care about macOS beyond the fact that it's required by the tools she has to use.

I impulse-built an overpowered Windows machine earlier this year and tried to pawn it off on her, but she didn't even want it because it doesn't run Sketch. She's stuck on a Macbook.

Some people are replying to you saying there are these great benefits to being macOS native, but they really pale in comparison to having to learn something as complex as Sketch. A few familiar component paradigms don't really put a dent in the learning curve, or it's at least vastly overstated. I'd liken Sketch more to Photoshop in the sense that some native components aren't going to make the hard stuff easier.

One practical downside of being macOS-only is that it makes those hard fought Sketch skills less portable and any business that uses Sketch in their pipeline now has a hard platform requirement. Maybe they'll choose something else like Figma. That's something much more tangible to a Sketch professional.

Even VS Code's popularity among developers (the one group presumably sensitive to "native" vs not) suggests how little weight "native" carries with most people. When it's time to get work done, turns out there are more important considerations.

I think you're right, hard to imagine it's a hill worth dying on.

Sounds like she came up with a good reason to decline the offer under the duress of someone comparing specs as a selling point. If I did the same with my GF who just uses the web and some standard apps, she'd be like "no, why would I want that giant monolithic rgb heat generator that I can't take anywhere?". Some people buy nacs because that's what the applications run on, or it's required for school, but a hell of a lot of people just like macs.

I agree. When I started my current job 6 years ago I choose the Mac because of the terminal. Then, when I could get the new Macbook Pro I stayed for Keynote (imho just the best tool for presentations) and Sketch (as an analyst I sometimes need to create dashboard mock-ups). Now I use Figma exclusively for that as I also use a Windows machine and sometimes a Linux one. Well Figma is usable on all of them and were it not for Keynote I would ditch the Mac totally.

In my agency Mac is there because of tradition from developers and designers. More and more developers jump ship to better hardware and use Windows with WLS2 or Linux. Designers tend to stay with the Mac even if they switch to Figma. Some years back it was PS -> Sketch. Now it is Sketch-> Figma massively for a year or so.

Without intending to criticize your relationship to your girlfriend, I think your experience presents a lesson in client-provider relations. It’s absolutely vital that you understand your client’s needs before running off and building them a solution they may reject out of hand.

An overpowered Windows machine is best suited for gaming, not design work. Vector graphics tools like Sketch work fine on a MacBook. They don’t need a desktop grade CPU with tons of RAM and a powerful video card.

Her aging Macbook Pro definitely struggles with the load. So much that she's asked me for help to figure out what's wrong. But a large Sketch project, like a large Photoshop project, is just resource intensive.

An overpowered machine would definitely be welcome. My point was to emphasize how a crossplatform app would let her take advantage of the opportunity (a new computer I built for one game that I'm giving away) where a native app does very little for her.

I use a Macbook myself and encountered the same thing on the new Windows machine. Every application that was Mac-only was just downside. It made me extra motivated to finished shifting my work environment to crossplat apps like VSCode. And CLI tools that worked well in WSL2.

Adobe XD is on windows and Mac and does everything Sketch does with its plugin ecosystem.

Windows is broken spyware.

Well. Being in a corporate job (agency I work for got bought some years back and we need to have compliance with the corp requirements) I can say that my Mac and my Win devices have the same level of spyware. While at least on Windows every program (as far as I am aware) follows firewall rules without circumvention. Not so on a Mac were Apple tools like the store circumvent the firewall rules I set up [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816

So I believe both platforms are problematic. Does Windows try to do way more data collection by default? Sadly yes. Is Mac without fault? Sadly no.

No it's the opposite: Windows is a functioning spyware.

Yes, functional spyware with broken UI. A dark mode explorer window is drawn in light mode for a split second and then painted black. It's ridiculous.

I see the same behavior on an external display connected MacBook with Safari. Split second day mode before dark mode.

Same for videos from YouTube in Safari when they go full screen.

I use Windows 10 for work and Mac OS for personal use and both have their share of quirkiness and bugs. Mac OS is way more mouse based UI and interestingly no one complains about it.

Personally, I heavily rely on gesture-based navigation on MacBooks. An equivalent trackpad for Windows laptops is nowhere to be found. It's a huge selling point for me, and it's a shame that there's little-to-no competition in that regard.

Sorry I can't comment on that, I'm probably the last person on earth that doesn't use dark mode.

It's good to know there are at least two!

That's not true on current Win10, I've never seen it before. What build are you using? Are you connected over RDP or something?

It is true, because I've seen it. Recent build, direct PC use. Windows is a patch over patch over patch.

I care about it, and if the software was available to buy I would pay a premium for it as I’ve done before. That’s why I landed on the Mac platform. In the “bad” old days, the only major developers were Mac die hards, and very little of the platform felt foreign or unconventional. Now, the only thing keeping me on the Mac platform is muscle memory and a few lucky (hardware) strikes.

Design is a team sport, so what you need to ask yourself is does the whole team prefer to use a native mac app vs browser? RIP sketch

Meh, "design is a team sport" - great, everyone gets to jump in and play decorator and backseat drive. There are a lot of people with knives, but that doesn't make them a brain surgeon.

My design team and myself will take the sanctity of a native app to create quality work any day versus a "design" free for all in the browser with everyone playing decorator.

Except teams benefits from Figma far more than on sketch. Design systems, plugins, multiplayer for holding critique/retros/planning, version control, etc put Figma far ahead of Sketch.

I manage a design team and there’s no way in hell we would go back to Sketch.

To even think that having a “native” app has any bearing isn’t accurate at all. Sketch is so slow compared to Figma. You aren’t using multiplayer everyday but when you do need it, there’s nothing like it.

Adobe XD does all these things and has Miro integration for seamless collaboration and works in windows and Mac. Any reason why I would use Figma instead?

I think Adobe's business strategy is a compelling reason.

Knowing that they had a monopoly on creative software, they raised the prices to the point of completely locking out a significant portion of their userbase.

If they could, they would do the same to XD.

> plugins

Seeing you write this, a doubt creeps that you ever used Sketch.

Definitely agree these sort of tools only help you if you have a functioning team, but this goes across everything. Had a manager come close to what I would consider bullying in my Google Docs before, would have been a complete nightmare using Figma with him, I would have outright refused to use it.

But if your team itself is functioning well and has respect for each others input it works well.

First, to say Design is sport is stupid beyond comprehension, second, implementation and optimisation are not design. Decorate your apps and be happy, but please stop with this nonsense. Every design project has a starting concept, initial design idea generated from one person - the designer. One. Not team.

>> First, to say Design is sport is stupid beyond comprehension

Agree to disagree (without calling it stupid beyond comprehension). Design is so much more than final UI. It's the whole experience, how it works and how it's distributed. And that involves a lot of stakeholders, not just one designer.

So why buy Herman Miller design, or Ive design. Implementation can include lot of stakeholders, and again this is not sport in any meaning. Definition of sport: An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.

Since when? I’m a mobile developer, which means I consume Figma designs, I don’t change them. And Sketch works much better for my needs.

A lot of Mac users do. We chose the platform because of it, among other things.

I hate that WhatsApp, Skype and other crap Electron apps that I’m forced to use because of other people can’t do simple things like propor multi language spell checking that macOS has had since day one and that every other app gets for free.

I think the killer feature of macs with Apple Silicon is that the iPad versions of Slack and Discord would "just work" and people wouldn't have to deal with Electron crap anymore.

I’ll believe the story that these will be any good when Catalyst apps will start behaving like native apps. If developers can’t bother making a native experience with frameworks that are meant to do this, I don’t think they will with an even simpler paradigm.

My canary in the coal mine: Apple’s own SF Symbols.

> start behaving like native apps

intuitively, it would seem apples answer is to make mac apps behave/look like ipad/catalyst appe (e.g big sur's uo redesign)

This has nothing to do with Catalyst. Apple Silicon macs will natively run the exact same binary as the iOS version, no Catalyst needed.

No. But a native iOS version will be even less (aka not at all) optimised for macOS than a catalyst app. My point is that devs using catalyst don’t respect any of the macOS idiosyncrasies so why would they when they write iOS apps?

An Electron app would still be better than a iOS version optimised for a big thumb.

Discord is made out of React native I think. The performance is incredible most of the times. Sometimes it goes crazy and uses 100% CPU for a long time as if there's a while loop somewhere.

And with Apple Silicon, Im not sure that the restriction right now is architecture. Swift supports both x86 and ARM right? The problem is that the interactions are different in the desktop OS and simply recompiling or running it on desktop would not be a great experience.

Apple Silicon macs can run iOS/iPadOS binaries natively, no recompilation and no Catalyst needed. I think the experience of iPad apps will be just fine.

Until the companies running them disable the ability to run those…

I consider the built in spell check to be of the greatest features of MacOS and I'm furious when apps either change the way their inputs work so you lose the feature or even worse add their own dumbed down bespoke solution in it's place.

Worth noting Sketch broke spell check many versions back around the time I stopped using it.

Both WhatsApp and Skype have web versions that, at least for me, work just fine. And Chrome's spellcheck is miles ahead of MacOS

>And Chrome's spellcheck is miles ahead of MacOS

Please substantiate this claim. To me, the opposite is true.

> And Chrome's spellcheck is miles ahead of MacOS

But Chrome is a klackety resource hog compared to Safari.

Web versions of native apps always feel clunky in comparison and they're almost always missing features, like accessibility.

> can’t do simple things like propor multi language spell checking

lol

See? I need it bad.

I agree with you, and I think this is a pretty good signal that Sketch is REALLY feeling the heat from Figma, because they aren't offering a better argument besides "we're native". The bandwagon has clearly jumped off Sketch and onto Figma, and not because it's "fashionable", but because Figma is plain awesome.

The thing IMO that really killed Sketch was not being able to share Sketch files with non-Mac users and let them open them up. They should have at least created a Windows/Linux (or web) viewer. They don't need edit functionality but nearly always someone in the approval/feedback process of a mockup will not be on Mac.

It's just not realistic at larger orgs (or IMO smaller ones too) to expect everyone to be on a Mac.

Then came Figma which solved this problem completely.

> The thing IMO that really killed Sketch

Are we just accepting that Sketch is “dead” now? Genuinely curious. I realize Figma has been doing great things, but wasn’t under the impression that Sketch is over.

I don't know if it's "dead" but I have known a bunch of teams that, within the past 18 months, all switched from Sketch to Figma, and I certainly don't know anyone that's switched the other direction, soooo...

That said, these were all website and mobile app design teams, and another commenter mentioned that Sketch is better for print design. Still, have to imagine that print is a shrinking part of the overall marketplace.

All I know is a few (2 or 3) years ago I constantly got expense requests to cover sketch license renewals. It suddenly... stopped. We cover a Figma license but it never seems much.

We had at least 4 people in the team that ran a (poorly performing, annoying) VM with OSX just for sketch.

Sketch has had an integrated cloud sharing feature for awhile. You click two buttons in the app, and you have a shareable, comment-able page or prototype.

Figma’s first-mover advantage is significant, though.

Ridiculous statement. Sketch is very much alive and it can survive on Mac-only users for a long time going forward as well, if they decide to.

Am I the only one who doesn't think Apple have much interest in supporting classic MacOS apps in the future?

Back in the day we used to judge the viability of Apples new techon if the Adobe suite was using them. This was a big deal during the Classic to OS X switch and the PPC to Intel switch.

I'm convinced Apple sees the future of Macs as running iPad apps, Photoshop and Illustrator are already there. Just how many other classic Mac apps do you think Apple consider critical? I think I can name 8.

I haven't really been too worried about that. They're free to build apps that are simpler to use, but the technology and frameworks behind it still need to be in place. As long as Apple themselves need to build e.g. Xcode, they need to be focusing on allowing developers to build macOS apps.

Yeah this. I love Macs but I mostly develop on my Linux Workstation so my company’s been using Figma since March and I’d honestly forgotten about sketch

Yep. Our company switched to Figma and it's been leaps and bounds better for productivity. Having multiple people working on the same design file at the same time has been huge.

This isn't a property of native apps or web apps.

As someone who's worked on a lot of collaborative technology, I find it weird how most of the interest in collaborative editing is confined to the web. As I understand it, Figma's internal collaborative engine is written in C++ anyway.

Collaboration all but requires being online (good offline collab is much harder to implement as you surely know), so that eliminates one of the main advantages of native apps.

Collaboration is also much more useful when you're not limited to only working with people using the same OS. Multi-platform distribution is built into web apps, but it takes a lot more effort to create good native apps on several platforms.

Also, of course, no need to install anything on the web, which is important for frictionless collaboration.

---

It's no surprise that both desktop and mobile OS-s are very much not optimized for cross platform development. It's a feature (for owners of those OS-s), not a bug.

If I recall correctly, Figma's entire UI is C++ compiled down to webassembly.

If they went to the trouble to write it in C++ why use the browser instead of QT?

Exactly for the sharing features people have been discussing. It may be OK for the design team to download the app, but product managers, devs, marketers and other stakeholders don't want to also have to go through the trouble of downloading the app.

A primary thing Figma understood better than pretty much anyone else is how collaboration among different teams (not just design) works in product development.

I’d imagine zero-install was a big thing

And Rust

Yes they run it in web assembly

This sounds like hell to me as a designer.

It’s really not because multiplayer is there for walking through designs, leaving comments, or working with another designer. I work on a team of 10 and I don’t see anyone else in my designs unless I’m handing off to a dev or doing a review. At that point it’s amazing, as I can link anyone in our org a design and they can open it.

Check out Adobe XD, it supports simultaneously editing by a team right out of the box.

But it’s been a worse experience for your mobile developers.

Why?

Figma is not a viable alternative if you're anything but a digital designer.

There are still print designers, packaging designers, exhibit designers, illustrators, the list goes on. I don’t see Sketch as dead, if anything it’s been getting a lot of cool new features over the past months.

Is Sketch doing anything for print? I haven't used it for a few years now and back then it was digital only.

Sketch isn't a print design tool, that is all still very locked up in Adobe with Affinity being the only real competitor. Not sure why it's being brought up in this context.

I thought that Adobe and Affinity are the only ones fighting in that front.

This is just one single-topic blog post on the Sketch blog. It is not a complete argument for using Sketch. It does present a complete overview of why someone would benefit from a native Mac app.

I don’t know what the bandwagon is doing, other than that I’m aware that Figma is also popular, but clearly cloud software has been contending with native for some time, each with their own advantages, and so it’s not surprising or concerning that software vendors of both software platform types would market the advantages of their chosen platform.

I don't know if they're feeling the heat since they seem like two different verticals. Sketch is a drawing app with support for some UI development workflows. Figma is workplace productivity software with support for some UI development workflows and drawing.

I love Sketch but it's closer to Illustrator or XD (at least, that's how I use it) than Figma. If they want to throw shade it should be at Adobe, since their interface is just better and app is faster/smaller/doesn't run six background daemons.

On a different note, I've heard multiple pitches where startups position themselves as "Figma for X" but never "Sketch for X." Figma is a platform that is building out into different markets, Sketch has much smaller applicability.

All I can say is I know of at least a couple of design teams that switched all of their workflows off Sketch and onto Figma, so seems like a direct competitor to me.

> It's clear users in general don't care about an app being pure Mac OS controls/SDKs/etc.

They may not put it in those terms, but they do. They can tell when an app feels 'weird' or slow (be it actually slow or just higher latency). That depends a lot on the user base for the specific app in question. The more 'casual' the user base, the less it matters.

Being native also allows you to get functionality for free that other users may depend on. In OSX it translates to things like scripts, or more often, assistive devices, like screen readers.

I like to write native apps (Swift).

I won’t go into why (as everyone here seems to be trying to convince everyone else, who aren’t really listening, anyway. I’m not really looking to change my viewpoint).

Figma is cool. I’m working with a designer, now, and we’ll see how it goes. Not sure I’d really say it was a direct Sketch competitor, though. I think Adobe Illustrator is Sketch’s biggest competitor, and that says a lot about Sketch.

What can Sketch do that Figma can't?

Work offline, Better font rendering

Better support for the built-in accessibility features of macOS.

I wonder how many people with visual accessibility issues would take a graphic design job

Accessibility features are used by people regardless of whether they have visual accessibility issues. For example, I (and many others–watch some WWDC presentations closely and you'll see this) use the "display zoom" feature during presentations and when doing UI work to focus on things. The feature where you wiggle the mouse cursor to make it big? That's an accessibility feature, but it got a prime spot at the keynote when it was announced. I have subtitles enabled all the time since it helps me catch things in videos if I miss what someone said. macOS has text-to-speech, which is quite useful to read me back things I write for grammatical errors or typos. Accessibility features can and are used by everyone. (Disclaimer: I have partial colorblindness and wear glasses.)

You can use voiceover as a way to add a lot of context and “color” to a UI. I make a big effort to support voiceover in my apps. In fact, most of the text that I translate is never seen by the user[0].

On the Mac, I also like to use tooltips, applying the same string as voiceover.

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara/blob/bbb1d98... (Note, also, that these voiceover strings have been localized in French, German, and Spanish).

of all the features you mention, except TTS none depend on the app being written in a specific framework as far as I know ? (and I don't remember TTS not working in e.g. Qt apps for instance - at least I know that I sometimes bash my keyboards repeatedly to stop the damn thing that I opened by whatever goddamn shortcut :D)

This was a direct response to your comment, so I was mainly focused on what accessibility features I use. However, one I missed but I use all the time is being able to control applications using accessibility APIs.

They could certainly take copywriting and proofing jobs.

Run natively on the Mac /s

Why /s though? It is a huge pro for some people.

Because it's already been mentioned a number of times in the thread and is a very major selling point (IMO).

Custom keyboard shortcuts

VS.Code users aren't exactly casual users and in the main are happy enough to use it as their main coding interface many hours per day (and yes I understand that this is HN so now there will be a bunch of people saying "I'm not happy).

I love VSCode, but Electron apps are still pretty brutal on battery life, so it’s hard to work for very long without being plugged in. I’d personally love a pure native version for that reason alone, but the feature set wins out for day to day usage since I work mostly from home anyways.

I love the things VSCode offers that its competition doesn’t. I can’t imagine working with any of the other available editors for the Mac. I hate how I feel like I’m working in a weird web app all day every day. I feel both simultaneously.

Give Panic's Nova a try:

https://nova.app

Wanted to say I started taking a look yesterday and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. But I don’t have my whole workflow set up yet. Thanks for the nudge, I’d been meaning to give it a look!

No vim plugin makes it DOA as far as I'm concerned

Compare it to plain vim and you'll be shocked at the responsiveness difference. I even find the jetbrains IDEs kinda laggy.

I’ve always found Jetbrains stuff really laggy, even when I tried Clion on my current maxed out 16” MBP, to be honest it’s one of the things that has always put me off their software. The text entry might not be laggy but the general UI has that “laggy Java” (sorry, I know it’s not a Java fault but I just associate it with Java GUI apps!) feel. Personally I find VS Code much more responsive on the whole.

I've been a software developer since the 1990s. I know how Vi(m) feels and I much prefer the affordances offered by VS.Code.

Ironically Jetbrains IDEs are Java, using Java Swing for the UI[1]! This is even less native than VS.Code where at least native widgets are used.

I guess this shows how much our impressions are formed by expectations!

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/12311981/280795

Swing is definitely not "less native" than Electron. The entire window is a web view in Electron apps. I believe Java Swing was even an officially supported UI toolkit on the Mac a long time ago.

Not in the way Cocoa is, but it had a PLAF coming from Apple at the time.

The menus in Swing aren't native but are in Electron.

Maybe Electron supports native menus, but VS Code certainly doesn't use them, at least on Windows and Linux.

Simple experimental proof: resize the window to be very small, and open a menu. The menu can't go outside the bounds of the window.

What menus?

>"I even find the jetbrains IDEs kinda laggy."

On my laptop (6 core 3,9GHz 32GB RAM and NVME) VS Code is fast and responsive, still wastes lots of RAM though. Jetbrains tools meanwhile were way more laggy on the same setup.

VSCode users never seen snappy and well-made IDE. Most probably think "source code highlighting" + "project drawer" = IDE.

Just going to leave this here https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

I just suck it up and adopt the tooling required by customer's IT, on private laptops I use Sublime instead, and pay for it.

And I dream the day that React Native for Windows/Mac team at Microsoft manages to force a VSCode rewrite.

It’s a huge mixed bag. Great and terrible at same time.

I still don’t think the vast majority of users care. Slowness is something separate and I’d agree that a laggy interface is an awful one, especially with a visual tool like Sketch. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make that complaint about Figma.

It’s true, the vast majority of users don’t need accessibility features, but those who do absolutely cannot compromise on them.

I'm not involved with figma in any way, just a user. But from what I understand, it is written in c++ and uses webassembly. Some ui parts are in standard TS+css. [1]

There is absolutely no reason not to be responsive, low on memory and as powerful as a native app.

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

The backend is rust I believe. But at the end of the day I've used figma and the UI isn't anywhere near as responsive as a native app. You might not care about this but some people do.

Totally agreed. And, although the site is definitely cool, isn't it kind of ironic? It's a paen to native-only Mac apps back in the System 9 days, when the developer experience and design language was totally different. Macs don't even look, or work, like this anymore.

I think it's great that this is what they want to focus on, but it's not very convincing as a business decision in general -- it feels like doubling down on the past.

As someone fortunate enough to wfh, works in both dev and ux, and uses Windows and Ubuntu, I couldn't agree more.

Nearly want to shoot myself every time I'm told, "Hey, I'm sending over the Sketch file" or "sigh An Illustrator again? I wish you had a mac w/ Sketch when you made these wires".

I can't blame the people who say that, but god damn just release a windows version. There's Lunacy for windows, but it's buggy as hell.

Call me old fashion, but I'm sticking to Illustrator for the time being