And if Apple wants everyone to start using SwiftUI to make apps that function on all Apple’s platforms, then the mix of UIKit and AppKit that is Catalyst won’t be the best way to make or maintain a cross-platform app in the long run, either. If developers (and users) seem mostly happy to use unmodified iOS and iPadOS apps on the Mac, then it’s not super likely that developers will put a lot of extra time into making Catalyst apps. The long-term future for Catalyst apps is unclear right now, and it may depend a bit on how developers decide to handle Apple Silicon Macs. The downside is that optimized-for-Mac apps can only run on Big Sur none of these new Catalyst features is being backported to Catalina, which will only be able to run iPad-style Catalyst apps. But that also means developers will need to put in more work to make apps look right, since changing these controls and scaling settings might break things about an iPad app’s layout.Īpple says that text-heavy and graphics-heavy apps in particular can benefit from running in “optimized for Mac” mode, and the company’s Swift Playgrounds app running on Big Sur will be Mac-optimized. Now, developers can click a “Optimized for Mac” checkbox in Xcode that allows apps to run at 100 percent of their normal size, preserving visual quality while using a standard macOS font size and changing iOS-style buttons and sliders to Mac-style buttons and sliders. This is less work for developers, who don’t need to redesign their app around a Mac app’s typical buttons and controls, but it can result in fuzzier text and images than native Mac apps (particularly on non-Retina screens). Mostly, though, those changes are meant to address complaints that these Catalyst apps feel insufficiently Mac-like.Ī typical Catalyst app is scaled down to roughly 77 percent of its normal size to make its finger-friendly controls fit in better on a platform with a more precise cursor. A lot of this is behind-the-scenes developer stuff involving what buttons and drop-down menus can look like, and we won’t get into all of it here. Big Sur brings a number of tweaks for Catalyst, the technology that allows iOS and iPadOS developers to port their apps over to the Mac.

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