AUGUST 2019 MACWORLD 9podcasts, it’s clear that Overcast
developer Marco Arment is similarly not
willing to dump a lousy version of his app
on the platform.
iOS app developers are Mac users—it’s
the only platform available for iOS app
development. They know what the Mac
feels like. I think many of them will choose
to do the right thing—but it’s a shame they
won’t have exemplary Apple apps to
inspire them.
CHANGING THE DEFINITION
Which brings me to why I think Apple’s in this
strange in-between state with Catalyst app
development. I don’t think it’s that Apple is
uninterested in building good Mac apps—as
Federighi himself said to CNet, “we’ve got to
co-evolve with our user base around
the aesthetics of the Mac experience.”
The implication is
that Apple knows these
Catalyst apps need to be
better, and that they will be.
When Federighi says
that Apple and the user
base must “co-evolve,”
that strikes to the heart of
it. Apple is changing the
definition of what makes a
good Mac app, and a lot
of that will be influenced
by the design decisions it
makes for iOS, because it
wants to unify its platforms as much as it
possibly can for efficiency reasons.
This is messy. A one-size-fits-all app
design approach won’t work, and I don’t
believe Apple really wants that. But in
macOS Catalina, it does seem to be
re-evaluating a lot of interface
conventions. Apple’s own apps—not just
the ones made using Catalyst—are trying
all sorts of different interface approaches
in somewhat inconsistent ways.
Let me give you one example: Apple’s
using an interface convention where
there’s a circular icon with three dots on it
in several of its apps. Tap on the icon and
you get a submenu with additional
features: in Podcasts, for example, you can
delete an episode from your libary. In
Photos, you can play a movie.
This is the sort of feature that, in theThe News app was one of four apps in macOS Mojave that was
imported from iOS.