For a while, I had that same nostalgia... everything looked great... but then, nothing really worked, the plugins were all kind of bad (half of my work is Golang, which Nova does not support), and VSCode allows you to have the same stuff on all three major platforms.
I realized the Mac software from your studios looked great, and yeah had unified Mac feel unlike the messiness of Windows world, but usually had worse functionality. (And they were all always paid.)
There was recently an article from Sketch, that says, how proud they are to have a native app in 2020.
https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-wh...
Yeah, nice, but... Figma is not native, it has a "worse" looking/feeling app, but... allows you to collaborate instantly - it's "collaboration first", not a feature side-bolted to existing app. And it can be run anywhere.
Chromium is horrible in abstract (why do I need to take whole Chrome with every app?). But they win where matters I guess.
There are many problems with Apple’s stores, but I don’t see how this is one.
I love (old) Mac software and I hate Electron software yet if I sat down to create a commercial app today, I'd use Electron. Here's why:
- I don't feel the Mac's UX is great these days. If my app doesn't benefit from a consistent and elegant GUI, I might as well do it with web tech.
- I can't keep up with Xcode and the OS changing constantly. There was a time when you'd get a couple years between OS upgrades, when Apple's documentation wasn't (entirely) useless
- Desktop software on the Mac involves so much complexity today (eg: sandboxing, certificates, iCloud, icon formats and sizes, etc) that I don't want to deal with it
The Apple ecosystem doesn't offer enough advantages for me anymore to warrant the effort.
Little details like the title bar of of every window behaving the same were great like ten years ago. You always knew if a dot was in the red close button it meant your work wasn't saved. You could drag and drop the tiny icon just like it was an icon in Finder. It was almost always consistent.
Preview used to be a simple app for viewing documents. I welcomed the addition of annotation tools like adding a signature, but why did they axe the standard titlebar behavior? Now you have to hover over the filename of the document and wait almost a second before the title slides to the right and reveals the little icon. How is that possibly an improvement over just leaving it alone? Did they think saving 16px to show a longer filename without ellipses was more valuable?
Notes is kind of a new app in my mind so it hit the scene when macOS was already starting to feel more like an iPhone, but it's still worth talking about. They keep making it more powerful, like adding checklists and tables and such, but they hide the most basic functionality, text formatting, under a flyout menu. I really like the iOS feature to scan documents. The cropping and contrast adjustments are so good that I can usually quickly scan several pages of handwritten homework within a couple minutes. However, exporting a scanned PDF out of a document on macOS is a mess. Right click on the scan and it take seconds for a context menu to appear. At first I thought it must be my computer got hung, but it's like this consistently. How did they ship a product that make something as basic as a context menu hang for several seconds?
I could gripe with more examples, but the overarching feel I get is that macOS is being pushed more and more towards feeling like iOS, the emphasis on programs editing files is disappearing, and one day everything will be sandboxed and I'll have to click through "share" menus to transfer data from one app to another, provided those apps are kind enough to let me import or export.
This appears to be the standard behaviour of document windows now. It also occurs in the title bar of Finder windows, for example. It is excruciating.
Worse: if you try to rename a file by clicking the drop-down chevron, typing into the Name box, and pressing Return, there will be no effect and the name you entered will be lost. Yes: they broke rename in every standard application! The only method I've found that works is to resist my natural urge to hit Return and press Tab instead.
defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/10/05/big-surs-hidden-document-...
However, for me the big issue with Electron or other web-tech apps is the performance - they all feel incredibly slow and laggy, engorge themselves on my machine's resources, and generally slow down substantially the longer they have been open.
Considering my main gripe about macOS when compared to say, Windows, has been the general performance of the UI and apps, this isn't a particularly welcome phenomenon.
ElectronJS is brilliant, it just needs to go on a diet. It truly is write-once-run-everywhere, which makes my life worlds easier as a dev supporting three OSes.
But it doesn't make your GUI pretty: you still need a designer. And because of that, I miss native GUIs where the design is consistent.
I would ding Electron because it facilitates a diaspora of GUI design when we actually need consistency.
In my experience, people actually pay for quality, even more than they used to. Back in the say, an app was like 99 cents. Nowadays, most apps are way more expensive or have some kind of subscription, which is okay for apps that are maintained and improved over many years.
I'm willing to pay for quality. The main problem is convincing me of the quality before buying.
Luma fussion just updated to allow you to video edit directly from an external SSD without having to import/export to local storage.
Apple killed the paid upgrade model for apps, and helped usher in a race to the bottom when it comes to app distribution. Now everyone expects to pay a dollar or two at most for an app if they pay anything at all.
Is there some place that catalogs development companies that are more boutique and quality focused? I want to help support these guys and keep them going.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Macintosh_software_co...
It used to be that if you wanted to reach the niche of tasteful customers who would for good software, all you had to do was target the Mac. Obviously it’s harder now.
They all sound like band names, which shows the passion, that went into these endaveours!
Sometimes I think I can almost perceive a little bit of slowness compared to e.g. Sublime—but then I lose sight of it.
Certainly in comparison to any similarly fully-featured IDE I've used its feel is notably quicker.
Vim and sublime still exists and yet people flock to VS code because they would rather get a more powerful laptop to run an electron app.
I have a windows machine and a Mac machine. The electron apps are the ones most most likely to function exactly the same on both machines.
Setting up vs code was a matter of copying and pasting config file.
Picky users might complain but from what I see, most users are just fine with Electron apps. We all use Slack, Discord, etc. at work and everybody loves it.
I only have two on my machine: VSCode, and Microsoft Azure Explorer. If I run them both at the same time, there's a 20% chance I'm going to have to reboot that day.
Microsoft has enough money and resources to make a real program, but it chooses to be lazy and cheap.
And of course, every program thinks that it's the one and only important program running on the computer, which is how we get into the situation we're in.
But as long as the product is “good enough “we will see this trend more as most consumers of apps care more about features than performance
They made one of the best text editor/IDE and released it for free. I wouldn't call that being lazy and cheap.
When I jumped into Apple in the early 2000's, there was amazing software. I recall in particular my first Intel-Mac-laptop. There was this amazing program that changed the GUI to look like the Bjork video "All is Full of Love". It was absolute magic (beyond the random crashes of the first Intel macs which SUCKED).
I think the problem with all app-stores is this:
1. There's lots of very low quality software. 2. There's no way to verify the software does what it says it does before purchasing.
I can't tell you how many times I've bought an app for my daughter--even from "reputable" companies that only has a few minutes of content before it starts begging for money, coins etc.
Or even if the game didn't beg for money, it was just nonsense. I bought my daughter a game that had no pay mechanics-- but, you had to earn "coins" to do impossible challenges to get prizes. I ended up playing most of the game for her because it was just too hard for a kid, and it was just too hard for an adult who cut his teeth on Atari and Nintendo. It wasn't fun, just tedious. The game required you to make 300ish correct decisions with about one second each in-between them.
In the old days, I was happy to drop 25$ on an interesting app.
I'd love to check out Panics Nova but the Apple Ecosystem isn't viable for me anymore. :-/
Never saw it being a problem for Panic, the OmniGroup, Procreate, Things, and others. There are tons of apps that are not 99ct and do just fine...
It's interesting that Apple struggled for a long time with 3rd party software. Developers weren't interested because the volumes were too small. Now it's almost the opposite, there are plenty of customers but the market is awash with cheap or free options.
It's not just Apple, this has been a general trend for several decades. In the nineties I paid for Office (about £400 I think), now I use Google Docs. It was the same for development tools, £1800 for an MSDN subscription, now I use VS Community, git and open source components.
I suspect this is inevitable because the marginal cost of software is so low.
Considering that companies like Unity were in the same boat, I'm a bit hesitant to point the finger squarely at Apple without considering the decisions these companies made for themselves.
Decisions such as making a 99 cent one-time purchase app and still expecting to succeed as a business.
i find it pretty good, i use it for swift development (packages/libs) with a swift plugin (language server)
it works pretty well for that, its quite lightweight and smooth for the most part
my only concerns are
1. the swift plugin hasnt been updated in a long time, when will it stop working? (general issue of relying in plugins)
2. i think it uses its own text engine, so it "feels" different to other cocoa apps, not a big deal, just something i notice
3. if you wanna just open a file and get syntax highlighting, dont care about autocompletion/building, its maybe a little heavy for that (in the ui sense)
4. this may depend on plugin functionality, but error messages sometimes dont work as well as in xcode (click to fix, duplicate errors reported etc) ---
its not as fully powered as jetbrains tho someday maybe it could!
It's not so much an app thing, as it is a societal thing. "You get what you pay for" was such common knowledge that AT&T used the phrase in its television advertising.
Now there are large segments of American culture driven by a "good enough" ethos, and the notion that cheaper equals better. When it only sometimes is.
You could see it happen when advertisements stopped having the warnings "Some assembly required" and "Batteries not included" because those defects suddenly became normal. The companies pushed final assembly from the factory onto the customers, and somehow we thought it was OK.
There's a lot of blame to go around: China. WalMart. Millennials/Boomers (same animal). Recessions. Globalization.
In my family, we do everything we can to buy quality, and support independent manufacturing when we can. But you can't always. My wife just spent $1,300 to replace a piece of furniture that was $300 Chinese junk from Ikea, because she was able to support a local furniture maker, and she knows it will last the rest of our lives.
But it doesn't always work for everything. Especially things like household basics.
What the fuck, it’s your decision to charge $1 because thousands of other devs do it, not Apple’s. If you want to charge $10-$50 and you think can convince users to pay that much, Apple is not stopping you. Seriously wtf.
Apple’s ecosystem got those hundreds of millions of customers in the first place because Apple lets the users decide how much they think apps should be worth.
Do you think users pay more on Android? https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/02/app-store-earned-twice-...
The good old days of really good, dedicated mac software studios are over. Made by Sofa, Delicious Monster, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Panic Inc, Rogue Amoeba, Strange Flavour. These were really great software studios that really upheld a standard of excellence for Mac software.
But how are you supposed to keep that up when apple forces you into a marketplace that basically relies on customer handouts, where your only way to make profit on your 99ct app is to hit it so big, that your have several million customers.
It's no wonder that there are no good apps anymore, we've swamped the market with cheap cheap stuff, and nobody wants to pay for quality anymore.
I've recently switched from VSCode to Panics Nova, and for a very brief moment I felt like I was back in the old days of Mac Os X where things just worked, and where I felt at home with my OS, without constantly waiting for a better alternative to come along.