Another hint at big changes for Apple Devs & merging iOS and OSX functionality (1 Viewer)

This is a big deal!

Jonathan Willing ‏@willing 12m12 minutes ago Bryan, TX
The new Photos for Mac is based on a new private framework in 10.10.3, UXKit. It is essentially a replica of UIKit, based on top of AppKit.

Click to expand...

The implications this has for, say a Macbook Air Pro and/or iPad Pro should be obvious.

Maybe I am just out of it right now...


But can you put this in layman terms as to what is happening?

So in iPhone development a series of special application frameworks were added to the traditional OSX for handling, among the many specific things for phones, a ton of routines that handle touch based interaction. These APIs have no equivalent in OSX, they are iOS specific. This makes 'porting' between the two impossible. What has been discovered is that a new set of APIs for OSX converting these uses to mouse and keyboard have been introduced and they work almost exactly the same way their iOS equivalents do.


But, these remain hidden behind a wall, we can't actually see how they work, only that they are being used. So we can speculate how they are implemented (for example that this new interface doesnt care HOW you are interacting, touch, pen, mouse, keyboard, whatever) but not really being sure.


We can only guess. And that's fun and exciting =)

Developer Brent Simmons isn't too chuffed on it:

http://inessential.com/2015/02/05/uxkit_skepticism

Dogfood's gonna dog!

Brent Simmons retweeted
Don Mowry ‏@donmowry 48m48 minutes ago
@daringfireball @brentsimmons Xcode 6.3 looks like it’s using UXKit, too

Click to expand...

Sounds like it is real and coming at WWDC 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...have-plan-to-combine-iphone-ipad-and-mac-apps

Sam Posten said:

Sounds like it is real and coming at WWDC 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...have-plan-to-combine-iphone-ipad-and-mac-apps

Click to expand...

That article doesn't say that a single binary will run on all platforms. Reading between the lines, if this does come to pass, it sounds more like a scheme to reduce the amount of work to support two different UIs (touch screen vs. keyboard/mouse) in source code. iOS app binaries might still be ARM-specific and iOS-specific, while macOS app binaries might still be Intel-specific and macOS-specific.

Sounds to me like API unification rather than the Apps themselves

Ted Todorov said:

Sounds to me like API unification rather than the Apps themselves

Click to expand...

And that's what I was getting at in my reply to Ron. Again it is all speculation now, and you could do worse than to read Gruber's long take on it:
https://daringfireball.net/2017/12/marzipan

Obviously the details matter here. I don't think that it will result in universal binaries to start, but I do expect them eventually.

Rene Richie makes the case:

Yup:
https://www.macworld.com/article/3269372/macs/ios-plus-imagining-a-mac-that-runs-ios-apps.html

I have work access to a windows touchscreen laptop and I don’t really find myself using the touch part of it. I’ve never used my Mac laptop and wished I could touch the screen.

But I have often wished I could run iOS apps and games (ok I admit it, mostly games) on my Mac. So a unified ability to run apps on both platforms would be welcome for me. But a touchscreen Mac is less exciting for me.

Setting expectations:
http://dimsumthinking.com/Blog/2018/05/02-Marzipan.html

The story so far...
https://www.wired.com/story/wwdc-2018-federighi-ios-apps-on-macos/

So out of all those announcements yesterday, the one I'm most excited for is...dark mode.

I have accepted my beta invite, but since I only have a production machine I likely won't install the new beta MacOS until the 3rd or 4th version. The first couple of betas on a major upgrade are always super-buggy.