Commentary

Ode to That Thing We All Loved Dearly but Also Understand That Its Time Has Passed and We Should Probably Just Move On

This post started as an email to Riccardo – a quick response to his iPod memoriam post. But I’ll share it here instead. Many people have written tributes (laments?) about iPod since Apple formally announced they’d discontinued the product line. No need for me to add to that chorus. Instead… Today, a coworker came into town who I hadn’t seen this year. Because I’m a crazy person, I noticed and commented that their Apple watch was gone – replaced with a regular watch. I stopped wearing it a few months ago except when I exercise. I feel so much…better…now. My …

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Half-assed Followup

I never know when it’s better blogging etiquette to update a published post with new information or to publish a followup post instead. But given the chance to use "Half-assed" in two consecutive article titles, I think the prudent choice is to seize that opportunity. After I posted "Half-assed Mac Apps" a few days ago in response to this article from Riccardo Mori, Christian Tietze wrote his own take on the matter, which spawned this Hacker News thread. Be sure to scroll all the way to the end of Christian’s post as he’s adding additional reactions and links on this …

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Half-assed Mac Apps

This week, Riccardo Mori published a piece about the recent perceived decline in Mac software titled “A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation”.

I was going to reply with a quick tweet-sized comment. But those 280 characters turned into a few tweets, then a full-on Twitter thread, and then – ah, shit – I really should write about this properly.

So here we are this evening. I want to present my short thesis answering Riccardo’s question of why so many Mac Catalyst apps are, at best, Half-assed Mac Apps.

A Computer Company

Things I want a computer company to be Hardware manufacturer Operating system vendor Model for how to build the best software for their platform Good corporate citizen Inspiration Things I don’t want a computer company to be Music store Music streaming service Television studio Movie studio News aggregator Fitness studio Advertisement company Bank Credit card company Bookstore Subscription podcast service Messaging platform Video game distributor Cloud storage service Online meetings host Email service Health platform Internet proxy Software gatekeeper Arbiter of other company’s business models The entire amount of commerce Monopoly The Police Things I’m purposefully not putting on a …

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The Title

This is something I’ve long intuited based on my own web browsing habits but never really put into words. When I stop and think about it, modern web browsers drive me crazy by limiting tabs to a maximum width because that width is almost never enough to show the full page title.

Well, except one web browser: Safari.

If Safari on macOS Monterey is heading in a similar direction where web page titles are going to be even more truncated, that’s going to make me sad. I guess we should do something about it.

Delight on a Grand Scale

I’m trying very hard not to fall into the trap of being yet another old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn, but I struggle to find delight on a grand scale in modern software. Every incremental step, year over year (from all companies, this isn’t just about Apple), seems to be focused on removing emotion and affection from our devices rather than finding ways to strengthen that bond.

“No thanks to the App Store”

Moments after publishing my previous post, I was doing a final editing pass and found Riccardo Mori published his own, excellent take on the App Store and developers. It’s spot on. Go read the whole thing.

The Entire Amount of Commerce

Since Apple will stand on a virtual stage tomorrow and tell us how much they love, value, and appreciate third-party developers, I want to be crystal clear about the value these apps (and many others) provide.

I could switch to Windows and Android. I wouldn’t like it, but I could make the switch. Except for all those third-party apps. I couldn’t give those up without significant effort – if it would even be possible to find replacements for each.

Third-party apps are what keep me locked into Apple’s lucrative don’t-call-it-a-walled-garden.

In any healthy software ecosystem, third-party developers and the platform vendor are a symbiotic relationship. To pretend otherwise is fanciful gaslighting.

Mortal Mac App Sins

Maybe I’m just an ornery old man yelling at the new kids running through my lawn. Maybe I should be content to retrain myself to hit ⌘H instead of ⌘W when I no longer want to see a non-document-based app but want to keep it running.

Maybe Apple has done the research and realized that a decade-plus of relearning computers with iOS had taught the over-60 crowd that fullscreen apps are the be-all-end-all. And Gen-Z, who grew up with touch screens, intuits that as well. Maybe there are diminishing numbers of us in the middle reluctantly dragging overlapping windows around like cave people?

Regardless, there is one specific UX sin that interrupts my workflow and annoys me more than anything else on macOS. I want to call out a few of those offending apps now before offering my dumb solution.

Receipts

Ten months ago I drafted a post about how incredible the Apple ecosystem is when all the pieces fit together. It was a month into the pandemic and I found myself walking through a real-life Apple commercial in the grocery store.

I was a bit stunned when I got back to my car and it sorta hit me just how well the entire end-to-end experience worked. As a lifelong adherent of the positive influence and power that well made software and hardware can have over our lives, I was taken aback.

And so while I was planning on finishing my thank-you post to Apple this weekend, that’s not going to happen.

Instead, let’s talk about receipts.