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by plussed_reader 3425 days ago
I feel like they've been doing this to osX, starting with 10.9 it seems like a lot of the visual flair of iOS has filtered into the macOS environment.

I fear that this will dumb it down too much for the power users, and conversely over-complicate it for the average iOS user. I'd love to be wrong...
1 comments
MR4D 3425 days ago
Yes, but this is not specifically what I'm talking about.

Think of something like MS Outlook - it's a big, complex app with lots of features. Now imagine that you only write the app once, but design two interfaces for it - one set for the Mac, and the other for the iPad. You compile through XCode, and upload to the App store. Apple notes that their are interfaces for both iPad and Mac, and posts it in both app stores.

Obviously the mechanics would not be exactly like this (I presume a manifest of some kind), but it should be pretty close.

For Apple, this would bring more developers onto their tooling (yes, even many of those that complain about XCode), and allow more developers to target multiple platforms with little extra effort.

In fact, one of the more interesting things is that Apple could even create new platforms that just require some interface additions and an updated manifest.

Have a bug in your code? One fix. One upload. One code review.

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TheOtherHobbes 3425 days ago
One basic problem - macOS has many, many more features than iOS.

There would be a lot more involved than redesigning the UI. The two platforms have fundamentally different class trees all the way from the view and user event classes down to core OS hooks.

There's some limited overlap, but not as much as you might expect.

Merging the two platforms and creating a UI-level split wouldn't be impossible, but it would be a huge job and would effectively mean a rewrite of both OSs - and probably of WatchOS and TvOS too.

It's not obvious this would be a good thing to do. MS tried it, and that was pretty much a disaster.

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scholia 3425 days ago
> MS tried it, and that was pretty much a disaster.

Do you mean the Windows Runtime subsystem? How is it a disaster?

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