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Should it be legal to rob a bank and turn yourself in?
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Some political assumptions made in this piece only serve to discredit the author in my eyes, and lobsters is not the right place for discussion on the topic. Not downvoting, but I don’t like seeing content like this.
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As a developer who moved from Linux to the macOS platform, this made me think about how many non-native apps I use as replacements for the Apple version. The obvious ones I’m thinking of:
- Alfred instead of Spotlight
- iTerm2 instead of Terminal
- Dropbox instead of iCloud
- Chrome instead of Safari
- Gmail instead of Mail
- Google Maps instead of Maps
- VLC instead of iMovie
- Spotify instead of iTunes
- Signal instead of Messages
&c. This surely isn’t a good trend for Apple to allow to continue.
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That’s not what’s meant by “native” in this case. Alfred, iTerm, Dropbox, Chrome, and VLC are native. Spotify is Electron, and I’m not sure about Signal. I’m guessing it’s probably a native app that does most of its UI in a WebView.
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As it might be useful to describe what is meant by native, it means something on a spectrum between “using the platform-supplied libraries and UI widgets”, i.e. Cocoa and “not a wrapped browser or Electron app”, so it’s not clear whether an application using the Qt framework would be considered “native”. It could be delivered through the App Store and subject to the sandbox restrictions, so fits the bill for a “native” app in the original post, but it would also not be using the native platform features which are presumably seen as Apple’s competitive advantage for the purpose of the same post.
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I’d call QT native. It doesn’t use the native widgets, but then neither do most applications that are available on multiple platforms.
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It may be native, but it’s not Mac-native in the sense Gruber was talking about. You will find that all three uses of “native” in his article appear as “native Cocoa apps” or “native Mac apps”. He is talking about a quite specific sense of native: apps that integrate seamlessly with all of the MacOS UI conventions (services, system-wide text substitutions, native emoji picker, drag & drop behaviours, proxy icons, and a myriad more). Qt apps do not.
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Apps with good experiences that aren’t available on other platforms keep users around. Third-party iOS apps do a better job of moving iPhones than anything else Apple does, because people who already have a pile of iOS apps they use generally buy new iPhones.
Electron is just the latest in a long series of cross-platform app toolkits, and it has the same problems that every other one has had: look & feel, perceived inefficiency, and for the OS vendor, doesn’t provide a moat.
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Counterpoint, their apps have always been limited and really for people who weren’t willing to learn and use more robust tooling. I mean how many professionals use iMovie.
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Any interest in a crustacean private leaderboard?
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I guess competition is healthy, but I have an additional suggestion: crustacean private help board: I don’t know how we’d do it, one big “ask” story/thread would be difficult, we could set up a github project for it and have questions as “issues” perhaps? We could have a wiki on it too.
EDIT:
Also, the idea of a lobste.rs joint github additionally appeals to me because I know we all dabble in various esoteric languages and we could have a “rosetta code” type of project where we solve the problems in different languages, and it would be fun to compare these solutions across languages.
EDIT:
https://github.com/a-red-christmas
In case anyone thinks its a good idea … please join up
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Buggered SSL cert; at least FF on Android doesn’t accept it.
Works now