What follows is an unordered list of things I’d like to see from Apple over the next few years, starting with the easy & obvious things upfront. Most of these have Radars filed against them, but since they’re more often than not dupes of existing Radars I won’t post the numbers here. Most of this is about iOS, but not all – I’ll say upfront that I don’t think OS X has a future with the way it’s going currently, and has been running on fumes for most of iOS’ lifetime.
A great wishlist by Steven Troughton-Smith. Mind you, Steven is someone firmly in the camp that sees iOS as the only way forward for Apple – suffice it to say, I have my reservations about that – so it should be no surprise that many things on this list are focused on making iOS more powerful and versatile.
> Right now, I really believe that OS X is a dead platform
Go away!
…and don’t touch this OS.
Not saying that OS X is perfect, but no one wants a crippled iOS on a Mac.
It’s not perfect but it’s the best desktop UNIX in existence with the broadest commercial software base. It also has a GUI that isn’t a big pile of beta-quality shit using 20 different GUI toolkits.
Exactly how I felt when I read that! We do not the disaster that is Metro on OS X, OS X Apps are fine thank you very much! if anything maybe iOS can evolve to run full fledged OS X apps when paired with a monitor or something…like Microsoft’s Continuum attempt..
Basically the post is saying: “OS X is dead, yet I can’t do no freaking thing on iOS so please turn iOS into OS X”.
That’s so fcuking dumb.
EDIT: (poorly) reworded
Edited 2016-03-03 09:21 UTC
Well… if “dead” means Apple don’t touching it anymore and don’t adding stupid iOS features anymore… then I want OSX dead!! xD
In fact, if Apple declares OSX development finished and give us Snow Leopard back I’ll be the happiest man in the world!! xD
I really don’t give a shit about any of the “features” added in the last 4 or 5 years. OSX is worse than it used to be, it’s some kind of living regression.
All the cool features like “Brew” came from the Mac user community not Apple!!
Apple must opensource OSX and let us, the Mac fans, improve it. We love it much more than Apple does.
I’m not sure he really “gets” what the difference is between UIKit and AppKit, and why Apple created UIKit in the first place.
They are the same UI framework really, except that UIKit’s views and controllers were specifically made for touch, while the AppKit equivalents were specifically made for the mouse. He really needs to ask himself why Apple “forked” AppKit in the first place rather than just add the touch events and gesture recognizers to AppKit. Or he could look at Windows 8/Metro (or Windows CE) for a first class example of what would have happened if the input device is not a integral part of the design for a particular UI.
Funny thing is, all the other things he wishes from OS X to iOS were also differentiated on purpose. OS X and iOS are different for a reason.
Not really. The programming model for Classic Cocoa and iOS is quite different. In Classic Cocoa, we didn’t used to bother specifying types at all, everything was an “id”, and you’d start your app delegate by instantiating NObject (or some other class) and using the UI to create all of the actions and outlets. All the params for the actions, all the outlets were id. Everything was so vague it was like some kind of magic.
Then iOS came about and for some reason, we started to be made to use the correct class names for our stuff. This was like a enormous paradigm shift in the Objective-C world. I guess we always could, but back in the Next days, the style was to not.
So the way the IDE works started to radically change. iOS stopped using the “instantiate an instance and then use the UI to connect actions to outlets, define everything using the UI” style of programming. The way the UIKit is put together just feels different in ethos to me.
The actual code is vaguely similar in practice, but a lot of stuff changed or just wasn’t supported. To say they are the same is probably a massive oversimplification of how the process of making Cocoa apps has changed since iOS.
Okay, fair enough. There are a lot of improvements of that sort in UIKit, but those are of similar sort as say comparing iOS 5 with iOS 9 where the first uses those odd auto layout masks, and the newer uses the constraints engine. Still, just below this the system is exactly the same using CoreGraphics for layers and the same event passing and view tree.
In any case, attempting to port 20 years of Cocoa details and features to UIKit is a very time consuming project. Microsoft has been trying to do something similar with WPF for more than a decade now and is still having trouble improving it past the user interface experience from the old Win32 common control based applications. The devil is in the detail.
Project builder and Interface builder used to work together in a completely different workflow. I personally think that the iOS team wanted to make everything more concrete and formal. In Classic Objective-C using OpenStep/Cocoa API, really, you didn’t care is the outlet was a button, a slider, a checkbox or some other custom “thing”. You hooked up the action, if the control supported the action it worked. I think that was what scared the iOS team, and made XCode change so drastically from 1.0… I still have like, XCode 1.x running on an old PowerBook runnign Panther and it works exactly like Project Builder (which was still used up till Jaguar.) It started to seriously change around the iOS betas. I think they first broke the way the Classes were subclassed and instantiated in the UI to create the entry point for adding the outlets and the actions. In the classic model, you designed the UI in interface builder, then you built the sourcefiles from a menu option, then and only then you added some code. But it’s like, almost the opposite way round now.
I’d settle for a damn notification LED on the iPhone. Is that REALLY too much to ask?
That is the #1 thing currently keeping me on Android. (And no, I’m not using the camera flash, you dolts.)
Edited 2016-03-03 03:52 UTC
Weirdly, that’s the only thing I miss from my Nexus 4… odd how such a seemingly small flashing light makes such an improvement.
But hey, Apple watch is like a small flashing light? right ? 😉
Yeah, a small flashing light that costs almost as much as my phone did
Actually, that’s a rather big flashing light.
The point is they could put one on the phone and save customers a few hundred dollars
I don’t agree that OS X is a dead platform, and I for one hope it sticks around a good long time. However, that said, I do agree with most of his other points regarding split screen, external disks/file management, and software development. I don’t want iOS to become OS X–nor the other way around–but I would like to see roughly equivalent feature parity between them. I suspect Apple would like OS X to be dead–post PC, and all that–but they’d have to make most of these changes before it could even come close.
The only UI point on which I disagree with him is the software command key. They’d do better to allow the user to customize the icons on the shortcut bar. By all means though, I do love and hope they keep improving their hardware keyboard support. I just think hardware and software keyboards are different animals and, much like touch screen vs mouse, don’t translate all concepts well between them.
The main devs from BeOS are still at apple. Just make it suck less and make an ui that is not flat…. how hard could it be?
What? After they spent all that time making it flat? Heresy, sir.
I thought half of the main devs were at google. Didn’t seem to help Android much. 😛
this wonderful environment:
https://codea.io
Agree with others, programming models of iOS and OS X are different.
This is a LUA based environment, very slick actually. . .
Recent improvements removed the need to wash the code through X-Code on a host to package it. . .
Codea is very cool, but my new fascination is Pythonista – this allows *real* app creation. As in you can instantiate real Views and run real Cocoa API and stuff with in the app, design real UI using real controls. I’ve no idea why they got away with it. I was playing with it yesterday and it really works. Learning Python feels dirty, but what the heck…
Can you distribute your code? Not to the app store obviously, but to other users of the environment? If not, then you know exactly how they got away with it.
I don’t know. They claim you can create “real apps”, so like Codea, maybe you can take the code and compile it to run as a standalone app… I didn’t look in to it as coding on my phone wasn’t really appealing to me this weekend 😉 I gave my iPad to my girlfriend, so I’m not going to do much other than play with this app I think.
Most of this list just makes me glad I already abandoned Apple. They deserve a “friend” like this; Microsoft had one who filed a stockholder suit because they wasted money on R&D when Office and Windows were selling fine.
OS X is indeed a dead platform as far as I’m concerned, run by a company that died for all practical purposes long ago (before the Cook era.) I tried an iPhone 3 briefly and am not even curious about the later ones. OS 9 was just too much better!
I never got to go to WWDC or MacHack, but I went to MacWorld regularly. That, and refusing all but Mac work, and bashing Windows and Linux when I had something better to compare them to, were the good times. I don’t care if they make lots of money selling lobotomized junk, but I have no time for it.