Apple Brings iOS Apps Into Mac, But Won't Merge Platforms (cnet.com) 46
Stephen Shankland, writing for CNET: With its next-generation MacOS Mojave software, Macs will be able to run some apps written for iPhones and iPads, a big new step in bringing the two technology platforms closer together. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, announced the change Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose. And he said Mojave will include four apps Apple itself brought from its iOS mobile software to MacOS: Home, Stocks, News and Voice Memo. "There are millions of iOS apps out there, and we think some of them would look great on the Mac," Federighi said. For now, it's only Apple that has the ability to move iOS apps to MacOS. But that'll change in 2019.
for how long? (Score:2)
for how long?
Re: for how long? (Score:2)
Forever, unless stated otherwise.
Home, Stocks, News and Voice Memo!! (Score:0)
aw shit son, it's the 4 apps i delete first when i get a new idevice
Re:Home, Stocks, News and Voice Memo!! (Score:1)
Things have clearly changed. Back when I had an iPod Touch it wasn't possible to remove icons you didn't want. You had to shove them into a folder and put it in a corner of a page somewhere.
Re:Home, Stocks, News and Voice Memo!! (Score:0)
I'm not your son.
Not entirely accurate (Score:0)
iOS Developers will be able to port their apps to macOS.
I'll Settle for Plants vs. Zombies II (Score:0)
iOS but no Mac version? it's too hard to play on a small iPhone screen.
Re:I'll Settle for Plants vs. Zombies II (Score:2)
paraphrase: "Plants vs. Zombies is too hard to play on a small screen"
I think this is how they sell you an iPad :/
Bait and switch 101 (Score:0)
Quite obviously the aim here is to go in stages such that, one day, Apple start a WCDC event with what looks like a mac on the stage, and a casual chat about how great the Mac is. And then Tim reveals, "... but this isn't a MAC, this is being driven - magically - by my iPhone!" ... and suddenly 1 billion users around the world have a PC in their pocket.
Re:Bait and switch 101 (Score:2)
And a lone Windows 10 Phone user will cry "but we had that way back in 2015!"
Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2, Informative)
They have an emulator in XCode. However, the user experience is terrible, and that's the value that Apple brings - a user experience that doesn't completely suck.
By bringing frameworks and APIs closer together, it allows the developer to make an app people would actually want to use, instead of some garbage emulated not-quite-right touch UI that barely works, otherwise known as Windows 8.
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
They have an emulator in XCode.
Technically they have a simulator. When you build your Xcode project, it is actually compiled twice: once for the target iOS device, and once for Intel x86_64. When you run your code in the simulator, it's running native Intel code, and not emulating the iPhone/iPad processor as in a full emulation environment.
It's worth being aware of the subtle differences. You can get huge performance increases in your code in the simulated environment, as you effectively have full access to the x86 CPU's processing capabilities. For this reason on-device testing is still very important.
Yaz
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Actually Apple is doing pretty much exactly what Windows 8 did, since WinRT was a set of universal APIs with targeted compilation. There was no emulation involved.
Sure it sucked, but it's hardly fair to compare Apple's 2019 vaporware with an OS Microsoft released back in 2012.
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:0)
I always thought XCode was Apple?
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no guarantee the computer has a trackpad because of the Mac mini, iMac and Mac Pro.
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:3)
There's a lot you can do without multitouch, though. Most things I do on my phone could just as easily be done on an emulator with a single traditional mouse pointer. Make the emulator treat the scroll wheel (or modifier key + scroll wheel) as a pinch/stretch zoom gesture and that'd cover almost everything.
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Already tried it. There's a simulator in XCode that does exactly that. And it makes for a terrible user experience.
What Apple are doing now is the right approach for user facing apps. Make iOS apps compilable for OSX, but allow for changing the things that are different on the desktop OS. Like resizable windows, typing and editing with a real keyboard, target sizes suitable for mouse pointer rather than finger, different transitions, a menu etc.
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Last I visited an Apple store, the iMacs were controlled by those magic touchpad things.
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:0)
Yes, developers can emulate an iOS device. But it sucks and is basically unusable. If you want to develop in practice you need a device to run the app on -- you can tether it and get all the instrumentation you need for debugging.
So while the "different instruction set" may be a long solved problem what isn't is getting things to run with usable performance. Remember, you aren't just emulating an ARM CPU, but an entire system. While an iOS device has nothing close to the performance of a desktop or laptop it is good at what it does and emulating different destroys the optimizations relied on for performance on the host.
Back in the day you could emulate a PC on an Amiga with emulation -- but the performance lagged so bad it was essentially unusable for anything more than DOS. For a while there was actually a product consisting of an x86 board you could slot into an Amiga because having the hardware was essential for performance.
The only time I've seen high performance emulation really work was Amithlon -- that was a custom linux kernel whose sole purpose was to run a 68k JIT emulator. By then the performance gap between Amiga hardware and PCs was so great, and the efficiency of Amiga applications was so great*, that you could have a (comparatively) screaming fast Amiga emulation.
* For example, Amiga's had just a few MB of RAM, but were so efficient that memory wasn't really an issue. Even bloated applications were (compared to Mac/linux/Windows) incredibly small. A full featured web browser was less than 1MB in size. Their most obvious failing was graphics which, due to dependence on a custom graphics chip set, had fallen generations behind the rest of the computing world. From a "whole system" perspective it was "cheaper" to emulate than linux (or even Windows) because it was an entirely single user system without any security (e.g., every application had full access to memory).
In short, while an iOS device has more powerful hardware than Amiga it has a whole lot more responsibility and security -- compartmentalization comes at a cost.
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:2)
I don't think there's any need for fat binaries. The App Store and The Mac Store are separate places. Different download for users, different upload for developers.
Same XCode project for both, same code, compiling for 2 different targets.
A developer would probably want to deliver them on a different schedule anyway. Different testing plan. And quite likely different bugs to fix.
The Xcode Simulator Works Well (Score:3)
Re:The Xcode Simulator Works Well (Score:2)
Agreed. I'm the same.
But it depends what sort of app it is. Motion, GPS, Games, Camera, VR etc, you probably do want to use device rather than simulator. And it doesn't take much longer to do so.
Re: Why not just include an emulator? (Score:4, Insightful)
Merging the experience in a way that doesnâ(TM)t force the developers to think of the different interaction results in things like Windows CE or Windows 8.
Importing an application in this context can be easy, by ensuring the best user experience for a given device is another story.
Re:Why not just include an emulator? (Score:0)
Given the current quality of Apple code, I would expect an open source Rosetta-style emulator well before the iApes can figure out how to stop scratching their asses.
Does it have dll hell? (Score:0)
Re:Does it have dll hell? (Score:3)
No. There's no point in sharing libraries between apps in this day and age. Storage devices are large, and code binaries are relatively small.
Re:Does it have dll hell? (Score:-1)
We have been here before. Doing library version management is hard so let's give up.
So now every app has its own update cycle, app behavior is inconsistent, bugs and attack vectors don't get fixed, and standard MacOS apps and a few utilities, editors and developer tools take up 1/5 of a 128GB SSD which Apple still sell, whilst 120GB hard drives were not exactly uncommon in 2002.
Sad (Score:0)
If their computers and laptops ran iOS, maybe they'd get more frequent hardware refreshes. Like the iPhone does.
Re:Sad (Score:0)
Why do you think they're ditching Intel for ARM?
Re:Sad (Score:0)
Why do you think they're ditching Intel for ARM?
They aren't, not any time soon at least. The migration to Intel from PowerPC worked because Intel's chips were so much faster that they could easily emulate the PowerPC chips and native code didn't suffer any performance hit, likewise with the transition from 68k to PPC.
Re:Sad (Score:1)
Why do you think they're ditching Intel for ARM?
Good question. Why would anybody think that?
Re:Sad (Score:0)
Why do you think they're ditching Intel for ARM?
Good question. Why would anybody think that?
If this isn't irony/sarcasm - because by doing so Apple brings control of the entire stack in-house. Apple has a tendency to do this (control the design of everything in their product, with actual manufacturing being the only thing outsourced). The i-devices are able to do match and exceed performance of Android devices with lower clock speed and RAM because of this. Intel performance seems to have hit a wall, the advantage of remaining in the x86 ecosystem is fading.
Actually you don't even have to look at Apple - even Microsoft is extending into the ARM space.
(heh, and Intel calls their CPUs "core"... anybody played Total Annihilation? Core vs. Arm!)
Re: Sad (Score:1)
Apple has never use an in-house processor for their Mac. The last time they came close to doing so with the PPC it turned into a disaster they had to abandon. So it's hard to say it's something Apple tends to do.
Re: Sad (Score:0)
The Mac is no longer Apple's primary product.
Look to the iPhone for what's representative of what Apple does.
What apple does with the iDevices is what represents Apple's tendencies. They've been taking things more and more in-house there.
Re: Sad (Score:0)
apple is a small player in the PC world
they didn't design their chips for the mac because the volume was too low
when it is worth it they make their own
apple A11 outperforms PC class CPUs:
https://www.businessinsider.sg... [businessinsider.sg]
they are ready
No use merging with the dead (Score:0)
Unless you're into necrophilia.
Hoping (Score:2)
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I might be able to go Windows free again. Then I can give the laptop to someone I don't like.
Re:Hoping (Score:2)
2004 called to let you know that Macs can run Windows now.
Re:Hoping (Score:2)
2004 called to let you know that Macs can run Windows now.
But its still Windows, with all the update fun that Microsoft provides.
iOS Andriod (Score:0)
This is a fact and itâ(TM)s undisputed. Also, Trump supporters love gay sex. Why?
Yes pls (Score:2)
Its a slow merge (Score:0)
Apple will eventually merge IOS and Mac OS closer together if for no other reason then to make everything better at cross platform use. This is he whole ideal of progressive web apps is to eliminate having to make a app for different platforms. Apple's biggest problem though is that it tries very hard to keep everything within its own closed end ecosystem which seems to be going against what is happening elsewhere.