For iPad developers, macOS Catalina makes it easier than ever to bring your apps to the Mac: The process starts by checking a single box in Xcode.For Mac users, that means many great iPad apps will soon make their way to the Mac. Whether you want to edit photos, learn a language, balance your budget, or play a cutting-edge game, these awesome apps offer the great Mac experience you’ve come. Catalyst is not as easy or convenient as the folks at Apple would have you believe. Apple made this sound like a one-click operation when in reality, if you simply ported the app with Catalyst you would have an unusable buggy mess. What’s needed after that is a ton of work to make the app compatible and bug-free. The Mac App Store still doesn't offer many favorites seen on the iPhone and iPad like Facebook, Netflix, and Hulu, but Mac Catalyst aims to change that by providing tools to make converting. Download apps by Apple, including TestFlight, Beddit (for Model 3.5), Apple Support, and many more.
Allegory landed for iOS13 and iPadOS 13 in late September.And the app is one of the first to use Catalyst on macOS Catalina. The Markdown-compatible note-taking app is great for everything from.
SAN JOSE, Calif.—When Apple revealed macOS Catalina at WWDC this month, one related announcement drew considerable interest from Mac users and developers alike: a new way to turn iPad apps into fully native Mac apps.
Dubbed Project Catalyst, it promised to increase the number of quality native apps on the Mac platform by leveraging developers' existing work in the arguably more robust iOS (and now, iPadOS) app ecosystem. But it does raise questions: what does this mean for Mac users' future experiences? Will this change the type of software made for Macs? Is Apple's ecosystem a mobile-first one?
Then there are developer concerns: is Catalyst just a stepping stone to SwiftUI? What challenges can devs expect when adapting their iPad apps for the Mac?
Ars spoke with key members of the Apple team responsible for developing and promoting Project Catalyst at WWDC, as well as with a handful of app developers who have already made Mac apps this way. We asked them about how Catalyst works, what the future of Apple software looks like, and what users can expect.
The Mac is a popular platform among developers, creatives, and beyond. But while the iPhone and iPad App Store have thrived as one of the industry's most vibrant software ecosystems, the Mac App Store hasn't gained the same level of traction or significance, despite the presence of powerful applications that are not available on mobile.
Apple seeks to funnel some of its success with the iOS App Store over to macOS using Catalyst. We'll go over how developers use what Apple has built step-by-step, as well as what challenges they faced. And we'll share Apple's answers to our questions about how the company plans to maintain a high standard of quality for Mac apps as an influx of mobile-derived apps hits the platform, what Apple's long-term plans for cross-platform apps across the entire ecosystem look like, and more.
Before we get started, here's a list of the Apple representatives and third-party app developers we spoke with for this deep dive:
Let's dive in.
Table of ContentsAn introduction to Project CatalystBloomberg reported way back in December 2017 that Apple was working on a project that would make developing apps for both macOS and iOS side-by-side easier. We learned at WWDC this year that one major component to that push is called Project Catalyst, which enables porting iPad apps to the Mac relatively quickly.
App developers can start doing this now with the beta version of Xcode, the development environment Apple maintains for making apps for its various platforms. To much fanfare on the WWDC stage, Apple claimed developers simply need to open their iPad app project in Xcode and click a single check box to be able to build a Mac app. Of course, it won't always be quite that simple—but it's closer than you might think.
The idea is to handle some of the difficult aspects of porting a mobile app to the desktop—like moving from a touch-based interface to a mouse-pointer-based one—automatically and quickly so developers can jump right into adding desktop-specific features where desired.
Here's what Apple's developer site says about it:
Mac app runs natively, utilizing the same frameworks, resources, and runtime environment as apps built just for Mac. Fundamental Mac desktop and windowing features are added, and touch controls are adapted to the keyboard and mouse. Custom UI elements that you created with your code come across as-is. You can then continue to implement features in Xcode with UIKit APIs to make sure your app looks great and works seamlessly.
Note that this is not emulation we're talking about; Apple instead sought to make it possible to build native applications for both the Mac and the iPad from the same Xcode project.
Apple dedicated multiple sessions at WWDC to educating developers on its efforts and what it considers to be the best practices for adapting iPad apps for the desktop. Todd Benjamin, senior director of marketing for macOS, explained to Ars why Apple has decided to make this a priority now:
We're at a stage at this point now where developers have fully developed iPad apps, and there's a great opportunity to take the work that they've done there, which not only leverages what they had done on iOS, but also takes advantage of screen space and some things that we can leverage nicely as we bring them over to the Mac.
Senior director of partner management and developer relations lead Shaan Pruden added: Best wifi channel for mac app windows 10.
[Developers'] customers had been asking them for a Mac version because they have a big install base on the iPad, and they just didn't feel like they had the wherewithal to spin up a whole other development team and do a port.
And why go from iPad to Mac instead of the other way around? 'We have millions of apps out there for the iPad,' Apple Cocoa engineering manager Ali Ozer, who worked directly on making Catalyst a reality, told Ars. 'So there's a direction which makes more sense, at least when it comes to enabling developers.'
Critically, bringing iPhone apps over to macOS is not what Catalyst does—they have to be iPad apps. This might seem surprising: the iPhone has one of the most robust software ecosystems in the world, whereas the iPad is mostly a subset of that. There are some iPad apps that aren't on the iPhone, yes, but there are countless iPhone apps that aren't on the iPad.
Benjamin said Apple made that decision because it's a more natural transition to bring an app from the iPad over to the desktop than it is to adapt an iPhone app over:
Mac app video recorder. Just design-wise, the difference between an iPad app and an iPhone app is that the iPad app has gone through a design iteration to take advantage of more screen space. And as you bring that app over to the Mac.. you have something that's designed around that space that you can work with and that you can start from.
Ozer noted that the move is also about pre-empting user concerns about mobile ports spilling into the desktop even though the ports aren't appropriate for the platform. 'This is one way of making developers aware that an iPhone app in its current form might not be the right design,' he said.
How it works
Many of the frameworks developers use to create apps for the iPad and the Mac are similar. Part of what Apple did here was bridge the differences that previously existed between the iPad and Mac versions of shared development frameworks. But the biggest gap is that between the UI frameworks.
Developers build user interfaces and functionality of iPad apps using the UIKit framework. Meanwhile, the Mac has a framework called AppKit that does many of the same things. Previously, Mac apps could not run apps made using UIKit, and iOS devices could not run apps made using AppKit. Even if a developer could reuse some pieces of their iPad apps when building Mac versions, doing so took a considerable amount of additional work.
When viewing their iPad project in Xcode, a developer can check a box to select the Mac as a supported device. After that's done, Xcode makes the following changes to the project, according to Apple's documentation:
Barring any errors, the developer should then be able to deploy a basic version of their app for the Mac. The following Mac-specific features should automatically be part of the new Mac version, Apple says:
From this point, the developer can add menu-bar items, apply translucency to the primary view controller, display and populate a preferences menu, add hover events, and so on.
Some frameworks are available on one platform but not another—for example, ARKit is not available on the Mac, so a developer porting an app that uses ARKit to deliver augmented reality experiences will want to consider that. In some cases, code pertaining to features and frameworks not present on the target device will automatically not be used.
In other instances, developers can, of course, use conditional logic in their code to deliver different experiences and functionality based on which device the software is running on. Apple, however, intended for that approach to be reserved for cases where functionality is simply not available on a certain device but is desired on another.
'We'd like them to use conditionals as little as possible because, you know, conditionals are different code paths that you have to worry about,' explained Ozer. 'And I think that the things we've tied to conditionals are APIs and features that are really very much Mac-only.'
Apple says that many of the developers building the first third-party Catalyst apps managed to get an acceptable build running on the Mac within 24 hours. But each faced some challenges unique to each app.
macOS Catalina was the next step in Apple's modern initiatives to control the user experience from top to bottom. This update closed off more walls, built up more security, and offered more ecosystem parity across devices. Mac Catalyst was also introduced; a system that will allow developers to bring more iPad apps to Mac, including Apple's own apps. This update also ditched iTunes in favor of three new apps; music, podcasts, and TV.
● Mac Catalyst
● New Apple Apps ● Sidecar ● Apple Arcade ● Screen Time ● Apple Watch authentication ● New security features ● New and improved accessibility features ● Public release on October 7, 2019
macOS Catalina is an update that adds almost as much as it takes away, and is one of the Mac's most important updates because of it. We lose 32-bit app support, the iTunes app, and even dashboard, but we gain iPad apps, new coding frameworks, and more ecosystem driven features. macOS Catalina not only benefits Mac users but iPad users as well, because of initiatives like Sidecar and Mac Catalyst.
Mac Catalyst
Mac catalyst is a developer system that lets developers take advantage of existing iPad app frameworks and implement the app in macOS with very little rework or alteration. Apple hopes a low barrier to entry will be enough to cause a large developer adaptation. The introduction of Mac Catalyst seems to be a direct reaction to the slow decline of the Mac App Store because developers who make iOS apps had very little incentive to develop for Mac.
Apple pushing for developers to make iPad apps run on macOS should see a trickle-down effect that improves the app on iPad as well.
In an update released in February 2020 added the ability for developers to bundle their iPadOS and macOS apps under one price. This extends to tvOS, iOS, and watchOS as well.
So now with a single purchase, you can have access to the same app across all of your Apple devices. This was introduced as a part of Mac Catalyst, but can be applied to any apps that exist across app stores.
Apple very rarely adds first-party apps to macOS, but in Catalina, there were several additions in the wake of Mac Catalyst and the death of iTunes.
Apple Music and Apple TV are both full Mac apps meant to replace iTunes. Podcasts also helps with replacing iTunes, and is a Mac Catalyst app built from the iPad app. These apps all share the same design language as their iPad counterparts, with the addition of Mac UI norms like sidebar navigation.
Podcasts and TV will look familiar to iOS users, but feel at home on the Mac.
Two more Mac Catalyst apps were introduced as well: Reminders and Find My. Find duplicate photos software free.
The Reminders app was rebuilt from the ground up to replace more modern task systems and has an all-new design layout for better scaling to large screens. Find My is a combination of Find My Friends and Find My iPhone. Both of these apps are good examples of properly executed Mac Catalyst apps.
One other note on apps: the three Mac Catalyst apps that were introduced in macOS Mojave did not receive any significant updates. Stocks, Home, and News remain in their not-so-great release forms. Hopefully, this will change in the future as Mac Catalyst evolves.
Apple’s Reality Converter app will let developers manipulate objects like this in 3D on Mac
Reality Converter was introduced, in beta for developers, by Apple on January 13th, 2020 as a new Mac app capable of viewing and customizing USDZ 3D objects. This will allow developers to create objects to implement AR quick view of them on websites or apps.
Sidecar brings new functionality to the Apple ecosystem, further binding iOS and macOS devices together. Now owners of both iPad and Mac products can take advantage of the unique use cases of both devices in several ways.
The iPad can act as a mirrored or extended desktop display for the Mac, a drawing tool with the Apple Pencil, or a digital annotation tool for notes and documents.
iPad acting as an external display for this MacBook using Sidecar.
When using the iPad as an extended or mirrored display, you get access to new controls. A digital Touch Bar is added to the bottom of the iPad screen, and a sidebar with shortcuts to macOS functions.
Multi-touch gestures that work on the iPad still work in Sidecar. An especially savvy user might consider using scripts to launch Sidecar via Siri Shortcuts, which would allow a mirrored desktop to show up on your iPad from anywhere in the home.
Screen Time was originally released on iOS as a time management tool for iOS users and family administrators. Now on Mac, users can see a breakdown of each app and website visited throughout the day.
Using this data you can set limits, and even control what content can be viewed. This was created with the hope that parents would no longer need to rely on app services with upsetting privacy concerns.
Just like its iOS version, Screen Time will let users adjust downtime and app limits on the Mac. A usage report is generated so users can see what they have been using across all devices.
Upcoming feature discovered in macOS Catalina 10.15.3 beta. When turned on users will be able to bypass built-in limits that prevent battery exhaustion and force the computer to operate at maximum potential.
This setting does come with some risks however, and the user is presented with a dialogue confirming that battery life may decrease.
More details have not surfaced about expected performance increases or what sustained operations in this manner will do.
macOS Catalina rebuilds the app permission system across the OS. Now when installing any app, it must request permission to access specific folders, contacts, and location data. The system is a little too overbearing, however, and offers no good way to manage these permissions on a wide scale.
App dialog boxes will appear much more often in macOS Catalina.
This means users will likely spend a lot of their initial run of macOS Catalina fighting with dialog boxes. To ensure all apps are secure and operable, macOS will also check for proper app notarization.
Apple required by February 3, 2020, that all apps running on macOS Catalina be notarized by Apple for security. Users worried about 'Windows Smartscreen' levels of abuse need not because the feature that looks for app notarization can be disabled if needed.
Voice Control received a major update across the entire Apple ecosystem with macOS Catalina. Now a user can reliably navigate and control any app entirely with their voice.
Text selection and zooming are both easily done with natural voice commands. If a user wants to click on a link, the 'show numbers' command will place numbers by every link on the page.
Voice navigation innovations like these are a game-changer and greatly enhance the use case for many users. Other accessibility additions include tinting the display, filtering color, and iCloud sync of accessibility settings like custom punctuation pronunciation.
The addition of Apple Arcade to macOS Catalina is as much a boon for the nascent service as it is for users. Now more than ever, gaming has taken center stage in consumer electronics and Apple is finally jumping in headfirst, not with a console, but with a gaming service. It is yet to be seen if any games will be 'Mac only' on this service, but some hope that including it in macOS will mean more robust gaming experiences in the future.
The iTunes app
iTunes had only become increasingly complex and bloated with time.
iTunes had been clinging for life with each and every update, and Apple just kept shoveling new tasks at iTunes over the years without much change in how it looks or operates. Finally, with macOS Catalina, we see Apple dump iTunes, for better or worse in some cases, for the new fresh apps inspired by iOS.
This was partially the fault of Mac Catalyst since it was a prime opportunity for Apple to show off its own system. It was discovered, however, that only the new Podcasts app for Mac was a Catalyst app. Apple Music bore much of the same structure as iTunes, and syncing was handed off to finder.
The death of the iTunes app does not mean the end of the branding though. The iTunes Store lives on as a digital marketplace where you can buy music, movies, or TV for your digital collections.
Catalyst App Download
Apple ended 32-bit app support on macOS with this release and had been telling users of this transition for a while now. The death knell for 32-bit architecture rang when iOS dumped support for 32-bit apps in iOS 11. This transition will only affect specific types of users who cling to old versions of software that now require subscriptions or deprecated apps that are no longer developed. Apple is confident that the transition will be smooth for most users upgrading and bolsters this choice with the addition of Mac Catalyst apps.
Be sure to find out what every application and system function will disappear once upgraded to macOS Catalina. The most comprehensive list can be found in the Mac System Information menu, and AppleInsider covers how to do this in detail.
Dashboard as it looked on older versions of Mac OSX
Mac Catalyst Apps
Dashboard was initially released for OSX 10.4 as a way to view widgets and web snippets all in one place. By OSX 10.10 it was disabled by default and widgets were placed in the Notification Center. Now Dashboard is completely deprecated, but widgets still live on.
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