by Jason Snell
James Thomson on using (and not using) Mac Catalyst
Developer James Thomson has written a blog post about a bunch of issues around Mac Catalyst, the new Apple-created method of bringing iOS apps to Mac. James is in a rare position to write about these issues, as he is the developer of PCalc, an app that already exists on macOS and iOS (and watchOS and tvOS, too), as well as the developer of a new Catalyst-enabled Mac app, Dice By PCalc:
It became pretty clear to me that I would need to rewrite a lot of the user interface, to find a happy middle ground between the iPad and the Mac. Which would probably benefit both in the long run, to be fair. But with everything else that was going on this summer, I couldn’t justify that work, with no guarantees at the end of the day that I would have something I was happy to ship. So, I mainly focused my time on things like Shortcuts and Dark Mode, and iOS 13 support in general.
A lot of developers are struggling with what Catalyst lets them do and what it doesn’t let them do. This is why I think it’ll be a while before we really understand how Catalyst is going to be adopted, and why Apple has a lot more work to do to make Catalyst better.