100 MACWORLD JUNE 2019
WORKINGMAC MARZIPAN APPS CAN BENEFIT MACOSMoreover, many of Apple’s apps—
especially the free ones included in both
macOS and iOS—feel like they’ve been
languishing in recent years. It would be
reductive to throw that all at the feet of
having to develop the same app on two
different platforms, but it certainly could
play a part. Having unified apps could
make it a lot easier to roll out new features
simultaneously across Apple’s platforms,
which in turn might make it possible to
efficiently implement more new features
and fixes.
Some of Apple’s downloadable apps
already seem to benefit from a more
tightly-knit development process: updates
to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote tend to
arrive day-and-date on the Mac and iOS,
for example. When I think of apps that
could benefit from this approach, my mind
immediately jumps to Mail and Calendar;
these staple apps have already fallen
behind third-party clients in some respects,
and could benefit from fresh looks across
the company’s platforms.MIGRATORY APPS
And, of course, all of this rests on top of
the benefit of bringing over from iOS apps
that don’t exist on the Mac. We’ve already
seen it with those first four proof-of-
concept apps, but there are other options,
everything from the Clock app (why isn’t
there an easy way to set timers, view
multiple time zones, or set alarms on your
Mac?) and Weather app (say adios to the
old Dashboard widget), to perhaps more
complicated offerings like Clips (step
aside, iMovie) or Shortcuts (watch your
back, Automator).
Not every iOS app may be a good fit,
but there’s a lot to be said for attracting
more people to the Mac when those
machines come with all the software
they’re used to getting on their iOS
devices—and that’s good news for
expanding the Mac’s reach, which in turn
could feed back into Mac development.
While we don’t know exactly how any of
this is going to play out yet, all eyes are
definitely going to be on this year’s
Worldwide Developer Conference for the
next chapter of this story. ■Calendar for macOS could use an update,
and Marzipan could be a way to do it.