Apple’s Use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in macOS

I recently took to rewriting what should be a very simple app from Obj-C to Swift with SwiftUI - because it&#x27;s the future. The CPU usage was at 5% while idle, just for having a simple tiny pie chart that updates. Not to mention that for some seemingly basic things I still had to use AppKit anyway.<p>Wrote basically the exact same thing 1 day later in Swift with AppKit and NO SwiftUI and it sits at 0% CPU usage with less code complexity. Maybe in a few years I will give SwiftUI another try.

It&#x27;s really not an impressive showing for SwiftUI. 4 iterations later and after being told it&#x27;s &quot;the future&quot; in unequivocal terms, it&#x27;s still at 12% (and only like 3% without any AppKit combined (last chart)). It&#x27;s not dogfooded for any productivity apps. For Ventura, rewriting &quot;Font Book, System Settings, and Tips&quot; is not exactly confidence inducing. If they rewrote Pages or Final Cut Pro, that would wake people up. One showcase productivity app. The thing is, in its current state, I don&#x27;t they can.

I remember making fun of Microsoft trying to combine mouse and touch in a single UI.<p>And yet here we are, Apple doing the same thing to macOS, resulting in the same shit desktop&#x2F;mouse experience that macOS has become.<p>I understand the reasons but it seems so incredibly un-Apple to sacrifice UX for this.

The iPodification of the Mac has been so utterly jarring to me. Little nuances in productivity have been reduced to accommodate porting over a platform that was designed for touch.<p>Microsoft tried for a decade to merge touch design in a desktop space and it was whole-heartedly rejected in the marketplace. Funny that Apple has been trying the same thing long after I get the sense that it no longer matters.<p>I&#x27;m not against the idea of unifying the underlying frameworks, but they went with a lowest common denominator approach. In my mind, that is a failure of execution on their part.

In 2021, the Mac grossed $30B. iPad ($30B) and iPhone ($196B) together grossed $226B. Mac users might think they&#x27;re still the most important part of Apple but it turns out, the Mac is quite insignificant compared to Apple&#x27;s mobile OS&#x27;s when you put things in perspective.<p>I am still surprised that Apple is pouring resources into the Mac. Nowadays, smartphones and tablets are the main computer for 90% of people. The sooner Apple rebuilds Xcode from the ground up for the iPad, the quicker we can get rid of the Mac with its decades of legacy baggage.

SwiftUI has been a pain to learn because it’s young and you still need to learn UIKit or another framework to get unsupported tasks done. So basically need to learn the old frame and the new just to use the new. At least that’s been my experience not knowing the older frameworks myself.

Meh. Apple has near infinite resources, it can do whatever it wants.<p>The rest of industry has moved on to Electron and keeps bucking, trying to get react native or some other cross platform thing to work well enough on mobile.<p>Apple itself uses webviews for complex UI in their desktop Music app. Are there any non-trivial apps Apple has created from scratch in the past decade using its own libraries and frameworks? No, right? Why should anyone expect the libraries they themselves don&#x27;t need or use to be any good?

Boggles my mind that as they rewrote preferences to match iOS not one person said “hang on, is this design even any good on iOS?”<p>Because honestly I find it impossible to find anything in it and the search doesn’t even work reliably.

Yup. and basically all apps (re)created suck big time. They&#x27;re just iOS ports. You&#x27;re forced to do litereally everything using your mouse, and for example the Home app, it&#x27;s basically useless if you want to organize&#x2F;edit things.<p>We&#x27;re going to a CRUD operation world, where you have to do every edit one-by-one. And then in a few years, people will be amazed that you can save so much time because of a new &quot;bulk editing&quot; feature.<p>Ahh such great times with Office in the 90s.

I hate this consolidation of mobile and desktop apps and I hoped Apple would have had the design sense to keep them separate like they should be. Mobile and desktop UIs are two different worlds with different interaction paradigms. Trying to combine them makes an awkward UI that feels good nowhere.