Some people have been clamouring for a way to run iOS apps on an Mac for a long time, and now here it is.
When Marzipan was first announced, Apple was very careful to temper people's expectations. Marzipan is not about some grand new cross-platform development framework. It's not about merging Mac and iOS. It's about allowing iOS developers to port certain iOS apps to the Mac with as little friction as possible.
And in that sense it's a complete success. Many 3rd-party apps can already run inside of Marzipan with little or no code changes. That's a huge win.
There are some very obvious downsides. Most iOS apps are a poor fit on the desktop and won't conform to the expected Mac desktop expectations. I suppose Apple could have gone the Windows 8 route and put these iOS apps in a completely separate environment, but we all know how that turned out on Windows. At least these apps attempt to mesh with the regular desktop environment.
Another downside is that it's a hack. These are pure iOS apps running inside of an iOS simulator designed to look like a Mac app. These apps have no access to the world outside of iOS.
If you're looking to make a great modern Mac app, Marzipan isn't for you. If you're looking for an easier way to share UI code between your AppKit and UIKit apps, Marzipan has nothing for you. If you have a relatively simple iOS app that you think might be useful on a Mac, Marzipan is exactly what you've been waiting for.
If you want a peek into what a grand new cross-platform development framework might be, take a look at the JetEngine.framework embedded in the Mac App Store app. It appears to be a separate UI framework that is neither AppKit nor UIKit, but can run on top of either. However, it's full of App Store-specific UI components and I would expect that it was developed only for internal use at Apple.
App Store is an awful app experience, just like iTunes, because they both feel like they're just rendering XML that comes down from a server instead of being a real UI implementation. Everything's slow and laggy under the best of internet connectivity circumstances, and once you leave the beaten path it's just excruciating.
The App Store app isn't particularly great, either. There are many UI paradigms it ends up breaking, and of course, it still goes for that sidebar/main window layout that all the Marzipan apps use.
>These apps have no access to the world outside of iOS.
Well, they can save files (like Apple's own audio notes app), connect to the network, and so on. So what access do they lack? They're not on the same direct kernel? That's probably for the better.
>These are pure iOS apps running inside of an iOS simulator designed to look like a Mac app. These apps have no access to the world outside of iOS.
If you mean the current 4 iOS app running on 10.14, then i agree. If you mean project Marzipan in general and what it means to developers, well we just don't know yet. Its going to be the next WWDC at the earliest before we hear any new information on the topic and its overall goals/capabilities are yet to be fully defined.
For those of us that aren't keeping track: "Marzipan is the code name for the technology that will allow iOS developers, with just a handful of modifications, to port the iOS versions of their apps over to the Mac." [0]
At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. But I guess getting a bad version of an app is better than nothing at all.
I hate the whole mobile-first trend, since it usually means fucking over desktop users. Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window.
>At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS.
It's not about putting resources for their own apps or not. It's about enabling this route to macOS for iOS developers. They're just eating their own dogfood.
>Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window.
That's what most people want anyway. Not to have to manage 5 panels and sub-windows for each app on top of managing their apps.
> At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS.
I'm confused. The resources already exist, it's called "implementing applications on macOS".
Marzipan is for iOS devs who want their existing application quickly running on macOS without actually porting it, either because there's some demand and they don't want to do macOS development or as a prelude to a proper port/cross-platform implementation.
Apple can't magick the void into the not-void, an iOS application works on different principles than a macOS one.
> At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS
From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Apple sees this and I think it's pretty clear their intent is for UIKit to supersede AppKit on macOS. One day.
Apple unfortunately shipped what is effectively the alpha version to the public.
Is anyone else concerned that the influx of cheap, low-quality iOS apps ported to Mac via Marzipan is going to effectively poison the well for existing Mac apps? Software prices have already been pushed to rock bottom on mobile but things are more sustainable on Mac, for now anyway...
Nah. Mac users who pay for software are a different demographic than their iOS counterparts in my experience. Such Mac users are usually professionals who pay a little extra for the reliability and quality and attention to detail that Mac apps have been know for for a while now.
If Apple doesn't offer a better solution, Electron's performance will eventually catch up to "good enough" for all sorts of purposes and then nerds will really be crying as those Electron apps take off in popularity.
Slack is only the beginning, and Apple sees what's happening, perhaps a little bit too late.
> You get the standard rainbow close/minimise/full-screen widgets and they work fine. Window resizing using mouse drags — not so much. The performance is just poor.
It’s ironic that this is an issue again. Poor window resizing performance was probably the #1 complaint in Mac OS X 10.0 back in 2001 — resizing exposed the sometimes very slow rendering behind the beautiful new Aqua façade. Apple spent a few years tweaking resize performance, even adding AppKit APIs so apps can adjust their rendering when in live resize.
Doing layout updates in a rapid mouse tracking loop is hard. The iOS window resizing system was designed primarily around screen size classes which change on events (e.g. portrait to landscape), so there’s lots of fudge room to hide rendering updates while the entire screen is being animated. The desktop doesn’t have that luxury.
It’s not perfect at the moment, but lately I feel like when I’m in macOS I’m running a browser and awkwardly trying to switch between tabs without Cmd + Tab. It’s not fun.
Over the last year I’ve been using an iPad with a hardware keyboard for productivity apps and it’s great. There’s apps for everything, even G-Suite, that I can Cmd + Tab through without any problems.
I really hope that the rough edges get worked out and Marizipan works; otherwise macOS will become even more stale.
The real abomination in Mojave is the Screenshot annotation tool. Good luck figuring out how to add and arrow with some text.
There’s a different shortcut for switching between tabs in a single application. I don’t know if I customized mine but it’s something like cmd+Ctrl+arrow. Cmd+tilde switches between an application’s Windows.
I feel the same way about Windows 10 Store apps. They don't have the performance issues mentioned in the article but they otherwise feel alien to the rest of the OS. Even web applications feel more integrated.
As I've learned so often to do with Apple experiments, I'm going to ignore this one and it's probably going to get better or go away, I seriously doubt it'll stay objectively bad like this.
Apple does this from time to time. Remember when iCal looked liked, to quote a Gizmodo writeup, "a lone cattleman's notebook" missing only "animated beaded tassels"? Or when Game Center on iOS looked like "an evening of backgammon at the nursing home" that "smelled like plastic bottle whiskey"? [1] Because they absolutely did.
Let's see where this thing goes. Seeing them remedy their many flagrant mistakes over the years has given me, oddly, hope.
Not to mention that it should be "Marzipan on macOS" or similar; "MacOS Marzipan" just plain doesn't make sense. This makes it should like a version of macOS.
> In this case, I suspect the Marzipan system houses apps in a window with a titlebar, and it automatically populates the window with the display name of the bundle.
It creates a window for each app, and the titlebar is set to the app name pulled from Launch Services.
I still think this is less about running iOS apps on Mac and more about pushing Mac developers to build their pro-tier apps as something that runs on Macs and iPads.
Mac has no shortage of apps. But the iPad Pro has a shortage of the sort of apps people use Macs for.
They should give you a native macOS storyboard that works with your iOS code. iPad apps used to have separate storyboards too, I think that lead to a lot of rethought applications instead of just stretched up. Working with different size classes in one storyboard becomes a nightmare quickly with a lot of differences.
It has a lot of potential but the apps included with Mojave feel way too iOS-like and out of place in macOS. Hopefully it gets better integration before they open this up to developers.
[+] [-] thought_alarm|7 years ago|reply
When Marzipan was first announced, Apple was very careful to temper people's expectations. Marzipan is not about some grand new cross-platform development framework. It's not about merging Mac and iOS. It's about allowing iOS developers to port certain iOS apps to the Mac with as little friction as possible.
And in that sense it's a complete success. Many 3rd-party apps can already run inside of Marzipan with little or no code changes. That's a huge win.
There are some very obvious downsides. Most iOS apps are a poor fit on the desktop and won't conform to the expected Mac desktop expectations. I suppose Apple could have gone the Windows 8 route and put these iOS apps in a completely separate environment, but we all know how that turned out on Windows. At least these apps attempt to mesh with the regular desktop environment.
Another downside is that it's a hack. These are pure iOS apps running inside of an iOS simulator designed to look like a Mac app. These apps have no access to the world outside of iOS.
If you're looking to make a great modern Mac app, Marzipan isn't for you. If you're looking for an easier way to share UI code between your AppKit and UIKit apps, Marzipan has nothing for you. If you have a relatively simple iOS app that you think might be useful on a Mac, Marzipan is exactly what you've been waiting for.
If you want a peek into what a grand new cross-platform development framework might be, take a look at the JetEngine.framework embedded in the Mac App Store app. It appears to be a separate UI framework that is neither AppKit nor UIKit, but can run on top of either. However, it's full of App Store-specific UI components and I would expect that it was developed only for internal use at Apple.
[+] [-] arcticbull|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeekyBear|7 years ago|reply
They've been working on this for a while.
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/02/05/photos-mac-uxkit/
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Well, they can save files (like Apple's own audio notes app), connect to the network, and so on. So what access do they lack? They're not on the same direct kernel? That's probably for the better.
[+] [-] therockhead|7 years ago|reply
If you mean the current 4 iOS app running on 10.14, then i agree. If you mean project Marzipan in general and what it means to developers, well we just don't know yet. Its going to be the next WWDC at the earliest before we hear any new information on the topic and its overall goals/capabilities are yet to be fully defined.
[+] [-] oflannabhra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|7 years ago|reply
This thing will be massively popular once mature. Whether that’s a good thing for MacOS in the long run, I don’t know.
[+] [-] gerardnll|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|7 years ago|reply
At least it's better than Electron, I guess. It seems ridiculous that Apple wouldn't put up the resources to implement these apps properly on macOS. But I guess getting a bad version of an app is better than nothing at all.
I hate the whole mobile-first trend, since it usually means fucking over desktop users. Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
The entire purpose of porting these apps to the Mac was to dog food Marzipan. If they had made “proper Mac apps” that would have defeated the purpose.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
It's not about putting resources for their own apps or not. It's about enabling this route to macOS for iOS developers. They're just eating their own dogfood.
>Remember multi-window apps? Now everyone seems set on forcing everything to be done from a single window.
That's what most people want anyway. Not to have to manage 5 panels and sub-windows for each app on top of managing their apps.
Microsoft did the same, Adobe, etc.
[+] [-] masklinn|7 years ago|reply
I'm confused. The resources already exist, it's called "implementing applications on macOS".
Marzipan is for iOS devs who want their existing application quickly running on macOS without actually porting it, either because there's some demand and they don't want to do macOS development or as a prelude to a proper port/cross-platform implementation.
Apple can't magick the void into the not-void, an iOS application works on different principles than a macOS one.
[+] [-] raydev|7 years ago|reply
From people with experience in both, UIKit is better designed than AppKit. Apple sees this and I think it's pretty clear their intent is for UIKit to supersede AppKit on macOS. One day.
Apple unfortunately shipped what is effectively the alpha version to the public.
[+] [-] nodamage|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sephoric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlesfe|7 years ago|reply
I think in this case Marzipan is a better solution, as it will allow willing developers to port native iOS apps to the Mac without much effort.
It won't help with webapp juggernauts like Slack or Skype, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
[+] [-] raydev|7 years ago|reply
Slack is only the beginning, and Apple sees what's happening, perhaps a little bit too late.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsmith14|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|7 years ago|reply
It’s ironic that this is an issue again. Poor window resizing performance was probably the #1 complaint in Mac OS X 10.0 back in 2001 — resizing exposed the sometimes very slow rendering behind the beautiful new Aqua façade. Apple spent a few years tweaking resize performance, even adding AppKit APIs so apps can adjust their rendering when in live resize.
Doing layout updates in a rapid mouse tracking loop is hard. The iOS window resizing system was designed primarily around screen size classes which change on events (e.g. portrait to landscape), so there’s lots of fudge room to hide rendering updates while the entire screen is being animated. The desktop doesn’t have that luxury.
[+] [-] bradgessler|7 years ago|reply
It’s not perfect at the moment, but lately I feel like when I’m in macOS I’m running a browser and awkwardly trying to switch between tabs without Cmd + Tab. It’s not fun.
Over the last year I’ve been using an iPad with a hardware keyboard for productivity apps and it’s great. There’s apps for everything, even G-Suite, that I can Cmd + Tab through without any problems.
I really hope that the rough edges get worked out and Marizipan works; otherwise macOS will become even more stale.
The real abomination in Mojave is the Screenshot annotation tool. Good luck figuring out how to add and arrow with some text.
—
Edit: Changed Alt Tab to Cmd Tab
[+] [-] binomialxenon|7 years ago|reply
Ctrl+Tab? (is it Cmd+Tab on the Mac?) Shortcuts like that are a big part of how I use the browser.
[+] [-] brazzledazzle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcticbull|7 years ago|reply
Apple does this from time to time. Remember when iCal looked liked, to quote a Gizmodo writeup, "a lone cattleman's notebook" missing only "animated beaded tassels"? Or when Game Center on iOS looked like "an evening of backgammon at the nursing home" that "smelled like plastic bottle whiskey"? [1] Because they absolutely did.
Let's see where this thing goes. Seeing them remedy their many flagrant mistakes over the years has given me, oddly, hope.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/5849940/ugh-god-why-apple-is-making-ever...
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
And that was bad because? Enough things look like "a pretentious hipster notebook" already!
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
It creates a window for each app, and the titlebar is set to the app name pulled from Launch Services.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|7 years ago|reply
Mac has no shortage of apps. But the iPad Pro has a shortage of the sort of apps people use Macs for.
[+] [-] chungy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tcfunk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dep_b|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walterbell|7 years ago|reply
Would Marzipan make it easier to go in the other direction, e.g. run iOS apps in tiled windows on an iOS laptop, alongside "CLI/terminal" windows?
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
Why do you think this?
[+] [-] ppeetteerr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhack|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codazoda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hazz99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jammi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtylowprofile|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply