JUNE 2019 MACWORLD 99there are plenty of glimmers of hope about
what this could mean for the Mac. I’d go so
far as to say I have optimism that
deploying iOS apps could be a boon for
not just Apple, but the whole Mac platform,
which is not only alive and kicking, but
even flourishing.
LIBERTÉ, EGALITÉ,
FR-APP-TERNITÉ
The proof of concept Marzipan apps that
Apple deployed last year were focused on
pretty basic, standalone tools: Home,
Voice Memos, News, and Stocks. They
don’t really have far-reaching implications,
and all use fairly simple interfaces. And,
most importantly, they were apps that had
never been available on the Mac before.
But attention has lately turned to apps
that could be replaced by their Marzipan
equivalents. While rumors have focused
on the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps
supplanting iTunes, I can think of another
prime candidate for the Marzipan
treatment: Messages.
The current incarnation of Messages
still owes a lot to its predecessor, iChat.
(For just one example, type /me
multi-protocol past.) But being beholden
to that history hasn’t done Messages for
the Mac any favors. It continues to lack
feature parity with its iOS counterpart, if
you know what I mean (sent with Lasers).
Features that used to be staples,
including support for other chat systems
like AIM and Jabber, have slowly been
stripped out as they not only become less
relevant to current users and the program
has slid closer to its iOS counterpart,
without becoming a true equal.
While complete feature parity with the
latest iOS devices probably won’t come
immediately (given that features like
Animoji rely on specialized hardware), the
iOS version of Messages remains more
capable than its counterpart, which lacks
not only those screen and message
effects, but also support for Apple Pay
Cash or any other iMessage apps. I’d
suspect that it may be high on the list of
apps to be replaced with a Marzipan
version. But it’s probably not the only app
that’s more capable on Apple’s mobile
platform—which brings us to the second
benefit of Marzipan.ONE APP IS EASIER THAN TWO
iOS and macOS apps already share some
underlying code, and they’ve largely
gotten closer in look and feel over the
past several years. But at a certain point,
there’s still a division in software for Mac
and iOS, requiring different efforts for
development. This split focus makes the
job needlessly harder: why do apps that
accomplish the same task need to be
implemented so differently?