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.
If my post implied Catalyst was a cause, then I worded it poorly. My point was to explain why Catalyst is in an uncomfortable middle ground that encourages low quality Mac apps – even if the tech existing at all does give us more apps we wouldn’t otherwise have.
I think Catalyst was (is) a clever and creative technological response to try and improve macOS software diversity by leveraging the massive iOS developer base and their enthusiasm, but failed (is failing) for the reasons I wrote about.
I’m sad that Catalyst isn’t the panacea that the absolute best-case scenario of the tech could’ve been, but hey, clearly a lot of work went into trying. Ten points to Gryffindor for effort!
Finally, in irony that only makes sense to me right now, this whole conversation couldn’t have had better timing as I (accidentally) built my first Catalyst app last month. I hope to share more about it some other time, but the summary is…
I built my own drawing/sketching app for iPad based on my own weird workflow and feature requirements. It’s just for me – no intention to ever distribute it. It’s 100% vector-based, with multiple infinite canvases you can spatially arrange in a card-style layout. Syncs to JSON files over iCloud. It’s nerdy.
Anyway, I made it for iPad. And after I finished, thought, “I wonder if this whole Catalyst thing works?”
And it did. Thirty minutes later it was running on my Mac. Bravo, Apple.
But the flip side – that aligns with my original thesis – is that while it works and is serviceable as a Mac app, it’s a terrible Mac app. Unfortunately, because it does cross over the threshold of being just good enoguh for my needs, I have very little reason or motivation to ever make it any better on macOS since that’s not my target platform for this app. That it works at all on a Mac is a happy bonus.
(That he linked to TextBuddy at the start of the article is a happy coincidence. I’m an avid reader of his blog no matter the topic.)
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.
Let’s begin.
Riccardo asks the question:
What is the newest application you have installed that turned out to be so useful and well-made it’s now part of your essential tools? An app that really got you excited and happy to be a Mac user? For the sake of argument, let’s leave out games (obviously) and single-purpose little utilities.
He surveys his own list of recent app purchases – and there’s nothing there.
[If] I open my toolbox with all the essential Mac apps I use on a daily basis for everything I do, what I see are old (some very old), tried-and-trusted applications…
This may be a completely subjective observation, but I’ve been feeling a certain stagnation in Mac software these past few years….the Mac as a platform appears trapped in inertia instead of progressing
There are factors that should be considered when observing the current state of Mac software, factors we could use to paint a picture that is necessarily imperfect and speculative
The most significant factor he writes about is Catalyst. He sums up Apple’s pitch to developers as
let’s remove the friction of having to deal with platform-specific frameworks, and let’s just have a system where you can effectively build universal apps that can run on iPhone, iPad, and the Mac with little effort.
There it is. Did you catch it? The first four words: let’s remove the friction.
Making cross-platform apps easy by removing the engineering friction is what I consider the root cause of so many iPad turned sub-par Mac apps. As Riccardo describes them
they appear and behave in a way that doesn’t feel very Mac-like, with UI elements that clearly are just cut & pasted from iOS and poorly adapted to offer a good, usable, consistent experience under Mac OS.
That’s too diplomatic. I prefer to call them Half-assed Mac apps.
“Half-assed Mac Apps” is a pun on Collin Donnell‘s delightful way of describing macOS software (made popular by Brent Simmons and then Gruber) that fully embraces the platform’s strengths, conventions, history, and user base. He calls them “Mac-assed Mac Apps.”
Half-assed Mac Apps are what you get when iPad apps are lazily ported to the Mac using the magic one-click Catalyst checkbox in Xcode. Yes, they run on macOS “natively,” but most are – how do I put it? Meh.
That’s not a slight at those app developers. Or even at Apple and the team responsible for Catalyst. The glut of mediocre Mac software that are clearly repurposed iPad apps under the hood is just a by-product of Catalyst itself not being good enough or bad enough.
Here’s what I mean.
If all of the friction is removed and it was possible to build an iPad app that Catalyst can render on macOS with minimal code changes, full UX fidelity, and no compromises to standard desktop platform conventions – that would indeed be indistinguishable from magic and a god-send to the Mac’s dire need of developer attention.
On the other hand, if porting an iPad app to the Mac with Catalyst was doable – but challenging. If it had a little too much friction. If it required serious effort and knowledge of the technical underpinnings of macOS. Then by that measure, any iPad apps that did get ported to Mac could only be done so by developers who understand macOS and the details that make it insanely great – either through experience or through effort.
Instead, Catalyst, today, is somewhere in the middle. Not bad. Not great. It mainly “just works” with minimal effort in a way that is accessible to the larger pool of iOS developers. Apple succeeded with the goal Riccardo laid out. And we end up with apps that typically fall somewhere in between serviceable and usable – an uncanny valley of mish-mashed blah.
Is it possible to build an insanely great Mac-assed Mac app with Catalyst? Yes, I absolutely believe it is. Are any developers putting in the extra effort to make that happen? If the products lining the shelves of the Mac App Store are any indication, it’s extraordinarily few of them.
As much as it is a job and source of income, for me, building software is also a way to relax, a form of self-expression, play, and in the best moments – joy.
Today, I want to show off a project so far along the joy side of that spectrum that it blows past being silly and borders on pure ridiculousness.
Let’s reskin Notification Center on macOS.
And make it look like Winamp.
Last year, I wrote two posts titled 240 Invisible Pixels and Surtainly Not. On the surface, I complained about how difficult it is to interact with the Big Sur redesign of the menu bar and Notification Center alerts. I believe Apple has fallen victim to a design fad where they unintentionally make software harder to use in their quest to simplify the design visually.
Making things look simple by hiding things doesn’t actually make them simple.
Affordances, color, contrast, delineation – hell, even discernible buttons – have fallen out of favor in Apple’s modern design language to a point where function often takes a backseat to form – especially on macOS.
Modern software, with Apple leading the charge, feels…sterile.
How much design and engineering effort has shifted from delighting users to finding new ways to interrupt their workflows with dark patterns leading to greater services revenue? It all feels gross.
Speaking of which, did you know you can save 3% on all your Apple purchases with Apple Card.1 Apply and use in minutes2
And so every time I have to tell Apple “Not Now” when “No” should be a choice, or when I have to guess where to hover the mouse to reveal what should be a call to action, I get frustrated.
I could let those things keep bothering me. Or I can tell the latest design trends to go fuck themselves and build something stupid and silly and fun and delightful.
The best part about Growl was the plethora of built-in and community-contributed skins. It was so geeky and personal, and you could make app notifications look like anything.
I eventually stumbled upon the SQLite database that holds app notifications. To my surprise, all the contents of your notifications are open and readable. And that’s when Growl came to mind. Could I build my own poor-mans Notification Center with different skins and themes?
It turns out, yes.
Could I layer on some extra features, too? Yep.
Say hello to Roar.
Roar is a little Mac app that watches your Notification Center database. When new ones arrive, it takes over and displays them with one of five ridiculous skins.
Bezel
The first is a straight-up reimplementation of Growl’s old in-your-face Bezel style.
Music Video
Growl’s Music Video display style was my absolute favorite for the longest time.
Macintosh
This style displays a classic Macintosh window – complete with the best freeware version of Chicago I was able to find with a quick Google search.
Finally, if you grew up in the 90s, how can you say “no” to an animated Winamp skin?
But wait, there’s more
My original complaint in 240 Invisible Pixels was how difficult it is to interact with notifications on recent versions of macOS, given their hidden buttons and tiny click targets. What if we take the mouse pointer out of the equation and make common notification actions keyboard-driven?
When I need to interact with a notification, I typically do one of four things:
Open the associated app
Copy a two-factor auth code
Open a URL in the notification
Copy the notification’s contents
Roar lets you do all of these things with a global keyboard shortcut. You can press the hotkey to reveal a menu with four choices when a notification arrives.
Press ⌘1 – 4 to select an action (or Escape to dismiss) and run it against the most recent notification.
⌘1 will activate the app associated with the notification. Basically, the same behavior as clicking a notification.
⌘2 will copy the first two-factor auth code it can find. In the screenshot above, that action is gray to indicate that no code was found in advance.
⌘3 copies the contents of the notification to your clipboard.
⌘4 Will open any URLs in the notification in your default browser.
That said, because the app relies on scraping your notifications from Apple’s database, Roar is at the mercy of how often the system saves notifications to disk. In my testing, that delay varies. Sometimes Roar will appear immediately after the original notification. Other times it may be ten seconds.
Is Roar meant to be an actual Notification Center replacement? No. Of course not. This all just started as a thought experiment and turned into a fun diversion over a holiday break from work.
Back in June, I posted a completely un-serious post that described a ridiculous Rube Goldberg approach to grabbing two-factor authentication codes from your text messages on macOS using Keyboard Maestro (for those of us who don’t use Safari).
How dumb was it? Let’s just say that it relied on taking a screenshot of Notifcation Center and parsing the code out of the image.
A joke, yes, but also a fun distraction one evening.
Their solution is to grab the most recent text from Messsages.app’s actual SQLite database and parse the token from that. Not only is this way, way faster – it’s much more error-proof as well.
Here’s the shell script they provided:
sqlite3 "$HOME/Library/Messages/chat.db" "select text from message order by date desc limit 1" | perl -lpe "s/.* (\d+) .*/\1/g"
With that, it’s just a matter of dropping the script into a Keyboard Maestro macro like this:
Besides the script itself, all I added was a step to copy the extracted 2FA token to the system clipboard and another to display the token in a system notification so you can confirm the macro ran (and worked?) before pasting.
Please note: The Messages.app database is a protected file on your system. For Keyboard Maestro to access it, you’ll need to grant the app Full Disk Access in System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Privacy.
(Remember to scroll slowly through that list when looking for Keyboard Maestro. It’s been how many years and still none of the Privacy sections sort their lists alphabetically?)
And big thanks to @ajorpheus for coming up with a better way to turn a dumb idea into something useful and reliable.
When I tell people, “I started my app business in 2007”, that’s not true. I never meant to start a business – it just happened. Because if I had sat down one afternoon and thought, “I’m going to begin selling software online today,” I sure as hell wouldn’t have intentionally named my company Click On Tyler.
For fourteen years, I’ve hated that name.
I began learning Objective-C and Cocoa in 2003. I tinkered around with tiny little projects for a few years. And then, in early 2007, I had the idea for VirtualHostX because I needed it for my day job as a web developer. When I finished the app in August, I had to put it up for sale somewhere.
Back up.
Two years before that, I was on my lunch break browsing recently expired domain names (I’m a nerd) and saw clickontyler.com was available. There weren’t touch screens back then – everything you did with a computer involved clicking. (That’s not true, but you know what I mean.) The domain name sounded fun, so I bought it. Nothing ever came of the website other than an awful About Me-style page.
So when I needed a place to sell VirtualHostX, clickontyler.com was the only website I had up and running. I put the app on the front page next to a PayPal button.
That was it. The name stuck. 50,000 customers. For a few years, my full-time job. And I’ve secretly despised it every day.
In fourteen years, I never even decided if the “On” in Click On Tyler should use capital or lowercase oh. And putting my first name into a company name (unintentionally or not) has always made me feel like my branding is one-step-removed from a solo divorce attorney calling themselves the First Name Group, PLLC. Every time I spoke “click on tyler” out loud to someone, I’d cringe a little bit.
Honestly, Apple ditching Intel CPUs and transitioning to their own chips is the best thing that could have happened to me.
What I mean is, the migration to Apple Silicon killed off VirtualHostX because of its dependency on VirtualBox (made by Oracle). I looked into every technical avenue I could think of to keep the app alive, but there’s no path forward that makes business sense for me.
I spent much of 2021 thinking about what I do now that VirtualHostX has reached its end of life. And I realized, holy crap, despite VHX being what I thought of as my flagship product, IhavesixotherMacapps that fall outside my original niche of web developer-focused software.
It was my wife who finally said, “Sunset VHX and focus on the rest. Start over.”
And that’s what I did this Summer. I paused and took time to start over with a company name I actually like and that I hope carries me forward another fourteen years or longer.
Have you ever triple tapped the back of your iPhone? No?
I wish I could remember who on Twitter pointed out this Accessibility feature, but I wanted to highlight it here and how I use this gesture because it’s such a fun shortcut for automation nerds.
Watch this.
At any time, from any app, whenever I need to remember something, I can tap the back of my phone three times. An input dialog will appear, wait for me to type in what I need to do, and file away those items into OmniFocus for later. I never have to leave the app I’m currently using or even launch OmniFocus at all.
Here’s how.
Settings.app → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap
From here, iOS lets you assign actions to two different gestures: double tap or triple tap. You tap the back of your phone with a finger in quick succession, just like you would double click a mouse button.
Options include helpful system commands like
Open Camera
Lock Screen
Lock Rotation
Take a Screenshot
Turn on the Flashlight
as well as enabling iOS’s many Accessibilty affordances and, for our purposes, running a Shortcut.
(I’ll go ahead and add here that I only use the triple tap option because I found double tapping is too easily accidentally triggered during my normal day-to-day phone usage.)
If you have a Shortcut that you use frequently or want immediate access to, these tap gestures are a fantastic way to launch it.
My wife and I were living in California in 2008 – most of our family back in Tennessee. I arrived home after work one day, and she said, “Your mom called me. She told me not to tell you anything, but we need to talk.”
My grandmother was 84 at the time and had been forgetting things for a few years. Those lapses in memory or the occasional odd behavior led to doctor visits. Which led to specialists. And then, a week before my mom’s phone call to my wife, an official diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
From my mother’s perspective, this diagnosis – this disease – was shameful and needed to be hidden. As much as we eventually fought over her not telling my grandmother, and as much as I don’t think I’ll ever forgive the final decision never to tell, I can understand that it wasn’t just her. That entire generation viewed anything related to mental health as a stigma. And whether or not the affected person was her mother or her son, the stigma remained and was not to be discussed.
My mom’s intentions were to tell no one – not me, my sister, family friends, not even my grandmother herself.
(The doctor didn’t tell my grandmother either. Why a physician would deliver a diagnosis like this to the child of the patient and not the patient themselves is unconscionable and borderline malpractice, in my opinion.)
So why did she call my wife to share the news at all? Because at the time, my wife worked for the Northern California chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. And when something like this becomes real, it becomes real, really fast. You need help. To cope, to plan, to prepare. You need advice on the next steps and the myriad of medical decisions suddenly just over the horizon.
And that’s exactly what the amazing people at the Alzheimer’s Association are for. In addition to advocating for and advancing the medical science of this disease, they are there to provide support and guidance for the families and caretakers of people living with Alzheimer’s.
Situations like these are never easy on the person’s family – no matter the medical condition. But Alzheimer’s is particularly vile because at some point, the person living with this disease…disappears. And other than the occasional fleeting glimpse of their old selves, the person that family loved and now has to take care of, is gone. It’s fucking cruel to witness the story play out over the remaining years. In my grandmother’s case, it took eleven.
My grandmother passed away in August of 2019 at ninety-five years young. Why am I writing this post now? Two years later? Before I get to that, let me tell you about her.
Her name was Bettye. This is her.
This is also her. (She’s the one climbing the wall.)
This is the first time she met my son.
And this was the last time she met him. And goddam if her eyes didn’t light up when he walked in the room – even if she couldn’t remember his name any longer.
This is a video of her using an iPad for the first time. As she swiped through those photos and intuitively, without anyone teaching her, pinched to zoom in, she out-of-the-blue remarked
You know that man in California invented this. He made all these things himself. Can you believe that?
And these were her dance moves.
She joyfully and fearlessly lived through more tragedies than I care to think about and had a wicked collection of one-liners that could knock you backward out of your shoes. When Trump was elected, she never once spoke his name — only referring to him as “That Man.”
My brother-in-law was the first of her grandkids to disappear, which made sense because he was the last to join the family. She never forgot my name or my sister’s. But near the end, you could hear the uncertainty and delay around my wife’s.
I don’t know how much she understood about herself, but the most challenging part wasn’t the end for me. It was the middle years when it was evident in her eyes that she still knew enough to know something was wrong inside her brain but didn’t know what or why. I can only imagine the panic she must have felt.
I said goodbye to her three years before her death. I had emotionally accepted that the person I loved was no longer there. That didn’t mean I stopped caring, or visiting, or checking in. Or letting my kids, her great-grandchildren, develop their own relationships and memories with her while they could in their short time together.
But it did mean that when I woke up at 6 am to the news of her passing in a text message from my mother – after a weeks-long agonizing final decline – I was at peace as much as I hoped she was.
She lived a difficult life, and yet met it with such apparent gratitude. She deserved much better than the way it ended.
But back to the reason for this blog post. I write about my grandmother this evening because my wife is working for the Alzheimer’s Association again – an organization that she loves and is dear to our family. This time, here in Tennessee.
She, her coworkers, and everyone at the association work tirelessly to one day see a world without this disease. It’s not an impossible goal at all. The first survivor of Alzheimer’s is likely out there right now – growing up.
Trains are awesome. When I lived in San Francisco, commuting down the peninsula every morning via Caltrain was (when on time) a delight compared to my Nashville commute today.
The train cars were this weird microcosm of Silicon Valley tech workers. Young college grads commuting to Palo Alto. Graybeards hopping off in Mountain View or one of the San Jose stops. And middle managers dressed up to look important.
A passenger sitting next to me in 2008 pulled this strange, angled, white slab of plastic with a screen I had never seen before out of their backpack. It was the first time I saw a Kindle in real life.
As a kid who grew up in the suburbs, for forty-five minutes each way, to work and then back home every day, I’d plug my Verizon USB dongle into my Mac, have just enough bandwidth to browse the web, and legit feel like I was living in the future.
Most commutes had a few regulars I’d recognize, but always something or someone new. One day there was a fight that ended in the conductor physically throwing two men off the car. Or the time a woman a row ahead of me began sobbing during an unexpected stop when word reached us that a suicide on the track was the cause of the delay.
But the story I’m reminded of today is the one about the only actual Apple leak I ever personally heard. I hadn’t thought of it in years until Jason Snell and Gruber briefly discussed how a hardware rumor could begin from a supply chain leak.
Listen:
I was commuting home on the train in August 2009. The section of the car I was sitting in was a pod of four seats – two rows of two facing each other. The seat next to me was empty, but across was a young woman and a man probably in his late 30s who very clearly didn’t know each other.
It was one of those awkward moments in an otherwise mostly-quiet car where one person will just. not. stop. talking. And this guy was going on and on about the electronics company he worked for and all the patents they had.
I was on my laptop – probably working on some failed app idea. The woman alternated between reading a book and doing anything else to not listen to him.
But what caught my ear was when he started talking about audio processing and microphones. It was something along the lines of…
Yeah, we made a new way to cancel out noise you don’t want to hear using extra microphones. In fact, you know what? Apple is using our stuff in the next iPhone. They’re gonna put a second mic on the back of the phone to get rid of background noise when you’re talking to someone.
iPhone 4 features a second microphone and advanced software to suppress unwanted background noise for improved call quality when in loud places.
Like I said above, I hadn’t thought about this conversation in years. But a quick search shows that the guy must have worked for Audience – based out of Mountain View – which was my Caltrain station every day.
Audience was the first company to have reverse-engineered the human hearing system and model its processes onto a chip, enabling computers and mobile devices to use the same kind of “auditory intelligence” that humans employ. By using this technology in conjunction with two or more microphones, background noise is suppressed, improving the quality of the remaining voice and reducing distraction for the listener. By using this technology in conjunction with two or more microphones, background noise is suppressed, improving the quality of the remaining voice and reducing distraction for the listener.
So that’s my one leak story. It’s not as exciting as finding a prototype in a bar, but I did manage to overhear how the new iPhone was going to listen.
I love our new world of always-on technology because it can provide empirical, digital evidence that validates the squishy, fuzzy experience of being human. It can prove you’re not crazy. That there is a reason for feeling the way you’re feeling.
I don’t have a good segue into this next paragraph, but one of the things I hate most about myself is I don’t think fast enough on my feet. It’s why I prepare so meticulously when I know in advance that I need to make an important point or defend my position. When an argument becomes heated, when I’m unexpectedly challenged without supporting evidence ready and within reach, I go full Costanza.
Given an hour to craft my argument, I can eviscerate the other side in a scathing email that makes my case. But on the fly, I fumble and back down in the face of a more aggressive opponent.
That doesn’t happen often, but it did today. And I could feel my body reacting, fumbling, and shutting down in real-time as it always does. Fight or flight? I noped right out of there. I packed up my bag and went home for the day.
The difference this time, since the last occurrence, is I was wearing my watch.
Were the stress and my body’s reaction real? Or imagined? (Does it matter?)
A 161 bpm heart rate during a contentious conference call sure seems to validate how I felt.
To me, that’s fascinating. The direct connection between a piece of aluminum strapped to your wrist and the emotions overwhelming your brain. A tenuous but verifiable link between digital and analog. An opportunity to recognize something tangible and make a change.
So when I arrived home today, I silenced and shut down every device and scheduled some vacation time for next week. In my out-of-office auto-reply, I even lied and said that I would be away without access to the internet or a cell phone.
Later, after sunset, I held my daughter’s hand and walked around our backyard in the pitch black for an hour. Me in my house shoes. Her with bare feet. We talked about the usual things that are top-of-mind to a six-year-old.
Why is it cold at nighttime but not really when it’s Summer?
Can wolves hear me with their long ears if I howl quiet?
What was that noise?
Where do bees go when it’s dark?
Where do ants live?
If I get a flashlight, will that scare away the lightning bugs or make them come closer?
