Thread by @wooji

Porting Pro iPad apps to Mac: A Thread.

Some of you may have heard that Apple have a new technology to make it easier to bring iPad apps to the Mac. You may even have heard that it's "just one click". You might be excited for your favourite iPad apps to come to the Mac.

Before you get too excited though, some things to be aware of.

It's never that straightforward in real life. For a start, to develop these iPad-on-Mac apps requires macOS 10.15 "Catalina", which isn't out yet, and the beta is... apparently giving some people serious issues

(for example

https://twitter.com/green_knight/status/1136196403443707904

or

https://twitter.com/kthomas901/status/1136013262321881088

or

https://twitter.com/mixedcase/status/1135881851732709376

...)

So, I'm not going to be using it to develop with until it's stable, which means I'm probably not going to be able to start work on a Mac version of my apps until the autumn.

For another thing, "just one click" doesn't work to enable a Mac build of an app like, say, Ferrite. While it (probably) won't take too long to resolve the issues around things like codecs, Ferrite's audio engine is built on AUGraph...

...which Apple just announced they have deprecated, and deprecated API typically doesn't work in iPad-on-Mac apps. I haven't yet tested AUGraph specifically, but it suggests there's likely to be significant work before it even builds for Mac, let alone is a Proper Mac App™

And I'm not interested in making "shovelware". During development and testing, like any developer, I use a mixture of real devices and iOS Simulator to run my apps. The experience of using the apps in the Simulator, while not the same as iPad-on-Mac, is close enough to know…

That there's going to be a significant amount of work to do, to make a Proper Mac App™ that doesn't suck to use. Things as fundamental as gestures and scrolling need to be rethought for the Mac.

On top of that, Apple are making pretty major changes to the appearance (and in some places behaviour) of iOS 13: Dark Mode, new symbols (button icons), new materials, new "card" presentations, new context menus, new widget appearances, and much more…

These look like they will require plenty of changes to the iPhone/iPad versions of apps to match. That's going to keep me pretty busy. Changes made more difficult if back-compatibility with pre-iOS 13 devices is to be maintained yet keeping the codebase clean.

(Although the bright side there, is that some of those changes could help making an eventual Mac version easier)

All this is by way of saying, I wouldn't expect a Mac version of any of my apps in 2019. My focus is going to be on improvements to iPhone/iPad versions — but done in a way that should hopefully ease development for Mac.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk etc 🙂