https://christiantietze.de/posts/2022/03/half-assed-mac-apps/

Christian Tietze

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What's the Problem With Old But Excellent Mac Apps?

Mar 4th, 2022

Tyler Hall wrote about "Half-Assed Mac Apps" the other day.

His argument goes like this: Catalyst made it easy to deploy iPad
apps to the Mac. But iPad apps don't make the best experience on Mac.
Users end up with more apps, but a lot of them being "half-assed"
Catalyst ports.

That post in turn was a reaction to Riccardo Mori's "A brief
reflection on Mac software stagnation", where Riccardo opens with 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?"

I wouldn't know if Catalyst is the problem. I think I don't have any
Catalyst app in my library at all. Except the default macOS apps like
Reminders and Stocks, if my memory serves me well and these are
indeed Catalyst apps.

But I also don't have any "new" apps, which in Riccardo's sense
doesn't mean a new purchase in my library, but a new app on the
marketplace.

Maybe because I'm not purchasing a lot of apps in general?

And then I don't understand what the problem is, for which Catalyst
might be a cause or contributing factor. What's wrong with non-new
apps?

The opposite of "new" is an app like BBEdit. It's around for longer
than Mac OS X. If you're a happy BBEdit user, are you in the market
for any replacement?

Riccardo's question is if something became part of your toolkit. So
if you don't miss a tool, you'd have to replace an old one.

What do people do?

  * Text editors: I've grown up with TextMate on the Mac because
    that's what all the cool Ruby on Rails devs including DHH used
    when I got my first Mac. I had absolutely no reason to switch for
    over a decade. Eventually, Emacs came along for different reasons
    and took over, so I'm not using TextMate for months nowadays. But
    I wasn't looking for a replacement.

  * Email: There were cool email clients in the past. Never bought a
    single one of them, though, because Mail.app was fine. Now they
    are gone, or their start-up company purchased by Google. - Oh,
    that was a decade ago, already?!

  * Web browsing: There's no real market for a new browser engine. So
    apps with existing engines, like a privacy-focused fork of
    Firefox or Chromium? That has been done, and why do it again?
    Sounds like a saturated market.

  * Visual anything editing: The "Affinity" apps that can replace
    Adobe's are great, but hardly new. It probably was tough getting
    into that space, but they carved a niche into what was a
    behemoth's monopoly. Sketch did something similar, also quite
    some time ago. (Figma, a web app, competes with Sketch now, but
    it's not a Mac app.) Blender, Godot - excellent open source apps
    that can be alternatives to the big players in the field, but
    neither are they dedicated Mac apps, nor are the projects new.
    Here, I notice we also get more cross-platform apps because that
    apparently pays better.

The more I think of this, the more I find Riccardo's criteria for
new-ness is rather weird, because where the big fish swim, small fish
need time to succeed, and then they're not new-enough anymore to
count. Or there's no big fish, yet, but I don't know any such niche.

On top, I don't know what y'all are purchasing all the time, a
prerequisite to make looking back on one's purchase history such a
disappointment. Riccardo is not happy about something, and I don't
understand what or why. Is it just existential fear for the Mac? Or
is he genuinely unhappy with the tools in his toolkit? Which are
these?

My days are boring: I spend 80% of my time in Xcode, the rest in
Emacs or an image editor. (And then I spend another 80% of my time in
Firefox because I forget to account for non-work-time and research.)

What is there for me to buy, and why?

For example, I am indeed a user of Affinity Designer etc. for 2 years
or so, to do some tasks that I don't have to do often, but for which
I now have a tool if needed. That's how little I truly need. I had
enough before and now I have enough plus a little luxury. Hardly
life-changing. I could live without these apps again. But I wouldn't
have a replacement. So are they even part of my toolkit, strictly
speaking?

All in all, the Mac app landscape appears to be in good shape. At
least when you look at beloved and established apps that once were
new kids on the block, like Ulysses and Bear, for example.

One might say the Mac indie dev scene has entered a cycle of
maturity. Less shiny new inventions, more catering to customers over
the course of years?

Maybe because the Mac user base isn't small anymore, either, so apps
are competing in a much larger market and fall by the wayside all to
easily.

Maybe disruption requires more discontent. I personally want to
continue to improve writers' workflows in the coming decade and
innovate in that space. But it's not like the current state of apps
makes writing impossible. The stuff that exists is good. We can make
it better, but there's no pressure.

Now I want to hear from you - do you disagree? I'm so stuck in my
daily work routine of creating apps that I'm not a good customer of
apps. So I don't quite understand the problem. Please share your
takes, on the web or in the comments below. I'll then link to
whatever I am made aware of.

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      + mac

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