How might Xojo benefit from this?
That’d be the final nail in the coffin for professional video apps on the mac. Not that anyone in my world is really taking Apple seriously anymore, but the last thing I want as an end user is for my desktop OS to behave like my phone…
It really bums me out, what’s become of Apple.
Perry, I was hoping for a more positive and technical response, but thanks!
That is NOT what that project is all about… Its not about turning your desktop into an iPhone/iPad… it IS about combining the frameworks… My guess is that it will remove the NSxxx and UIxxx class designations and replace them with a single nomenclature, and that the compiler will do what is required. Today you can write a single code base that will compile for macOS and iOS but it is very very messy.
As to how Xojo can benefit will depend a lot on exactly how Marzapan is implemented, but I’m thinking it will be VERY Xcode centric. So Xojo might be able to leverage the internals, but the app developement (IDE) would need to remain similar to what it is today
Isn’t it though?
I mean the desktop OS has been slowly moving towards a more iOS-like experience for years, to the detriment of a certain class of applications (some of which happen to be the ones I use daily, so this touches a bit of a nerve).
I love my iPhone. I also love my Mac desktop. I don’t like that iPhone features (like gestures and Siri for starters, with more to come, I’m sure) are making their way to the desktop/laptop line, because those machines serve entirely different purposes and you interact with them in entirely different ways. Mojave is already fairly iOS like visually in many ways.
I can definitely see the utility of a unified framework for many applications - cloud-based stuff, for instance. If you’re making games, simple utility applications, things that interact with databases, this is probably great news since it’ll mean easier deployment across platforms.
I’m just pointing out that it will come at a cost: The migration away from Mac OS by people with high-performance use cases is already well underway thanks to pretty underwhelming hardware offerings on the non-portable side of things for the last several years. There has been chatter about Apple unifying the programming frameworks for some time now, and I’ve never seen as many people in the video world abandoning Apple as I have in the last couple years. What bums me out is that this was one of the markets that drove Apple’s recovery from the 1990s dark ages.
Sorry to go off on a tangent here. like I said - hits a nerve.
[quote=425554:@Perry Paolantonio]
Isn’t it though?[/quote]
No it isnt’
Nobody has EVER said this was the case. This is NOT about making macOS more iOS-like, this is about creating a developement environemnt that is more truly cross platform. Is Xojo trying to make Windows more like macOS, or macOS more like Linux… no but they have to make compromises which keep Xojo from exploiting all the possiblitys of all the various OS. Marizapan is going to help remove that so at least for Apple Products a single code base can exploit the best of macOS and iOS .
But then we are all guessing here since the details have not been published. So perhaps I have hoping for the best, and you are lamenting the worst
Just a couple of take away quotes I spotted in there, it could be the press getting things wrong because as we all know how accurate they are 
“Apple plans to let developers port their iPad apps to Mac computers via a new software development kit”
“Apple plans to expand the kit so iPhone applications can be converted into Mac apps in the same way”
RIP native controls?
“Apple plans to start transitioning some Macs to its own chips as early as 2020”
Interested to see how all this turns out.
As for David’s original question, I doubt it will affect Xojo.
I think the opposite is true… perhaps Apple will develop more native controls (and/or re-engineer the under-pinnings of existing ones, which would be transparent to the developer/end-user). Right now , the macOS framework and UIKit share MANY controls (NSButton vs UIButton for example). NSButton howvever lacks many features that UIButton has (probably because NSButton was created years ago, and UIButton is more ‘modern’). I believe that part of what Marzapan will do is bring both platforms to a more consistent level which will actually benefit macOS. This same thing exists for many macOS “native” controls. Not to mention there are some controls iOS has, that macOS could benefit from, and vice-versa.
Apples code name Marzipan is making me hungry 
Just look at the “App Store.app” in macOS 10.14.
Click on a “Show All” link, and the content “slides in” from the right (such as one would expect on iOS, not very much on macOS). And you get the “<” link on top-left, much as in iOS NavigationBar. And the content will slide-away again.
The “Stories” “slide up” from bottom-top (such as an iOS Modal View with that Transition-method
luckily not the “flip” one). And you get the “Done” button on top-right.
We will get to see more apps that behave like this. It feels so “iPad-ish” - and I don’t quite like it on macOS (at least until now).
But hey - they can now create a single UI, and have it work on both iOS and macOS it’s cool - ok for some apps. But not for all. And their very own “App Store” shows this. Such an app should work and look&feel quite a bit different on macOS (in my opinion).
[quote=425557:@Dave S]
Nobody has EVER said this was the case. This is NOT about making macOS more iOS-like, this is about creating a developement environemnt that is more truly cross platform.[/quote]
In terms of the migration away from Mac OS, I’m talking about that happening in the pro video world, which Apple absolutely dominated for well over a decade. With the lack of substantive hardware changes to the MacPro line (the trashcan macs have been hugely problematic due to GPU overheating issues) in over 6 years, many who need workstation-level power to do their work have moved to Windows or Linux (mostly Windows), begrudgingly, for the past couple of years.
As to the change in the desktop OS to a more iOS like experience, it’s something that has been happening, slowly, for years. Mojave feels an awful lot like an iPad in some ways. (I’m talking visually here, obviously it’s still dramatically different under the hood). And honestly, it makes perfect sense to merge the two. I understand what you’re saying about this being primarily about the development environment. But the article talks about developers being able to build a single binary that runs on iOS and MacOS - you don’t think that developers will be tempted to make an application for one platform and just let it run on the other? When that happens, you start limiting what an application do, so that you’re sure to run properly on the lowest common denominator. And really, there are so many applications for which this won’t even be an issue, the end user will probably never know the difference.
And this is likely why we haven’t seen a serious MacPro upgrade in years. There has been talk of this for some time, and to my mind it speaks to apple’s plans to center their ecosystem around iOS. After all, it’s iOS and the phone/tablet world where apple makes all their money. It just makes sense to do that.
It just sucks for those of us who prefer to use the Mac over Windows, and need the power of a workstation. But that’s old news - apple abandoned that market some time ago, they just haven’t completely let go of it yet.
[quote=425548:@Perry Paolantonio]That’d be the final nail in the coffin for professional video apps on the mac. Not that anyone in my world is really taking Apple seriously anymore, but the last thing I want as an end user is for my desktop OS to behave like my phone…
It really bums me out, what’s become of Apple.[/quote]
That was the big mistake Windows 8 was based upon 
More seriously, Marzipan has been at work for a while under the hood. Anybody using declares knows that a great deal of the Mac framework works very much like iOS. From what I understand, there is no longer a macOS division.
Chances are we soon will have a macOS that will be entirely iOS under the hood. Then running iOS apps on the Mac should be easy as pie. The part about creating apps for both mobile and desktop seems more challenging, though. The UI is vastly different, as well as viewer.
I wonder where Xojo will stand with that, though. It should make it a whole lot easier to support iOS, but will Xojo be able to transparently compile for iOS as well as macOS remains to be seen.
If you are referring to the Swift/Objc Frameworks for producing macOS vs iOS apps, then there is a HUGE gap
macOS uses AppKit while iOS uses UIKit and the names are not the same (see the example I mentioned above), and even for what should be similar controls (ie. NS/UIButton) the available attributes are not even close. Not to mention that both frameworks contain controls that should be in both but are not. So yes, in this respect there is still a macOS vs iOS division.
There have been attempts to create xPlat control subclasses (that would compile as NS on macOS and as UI on iOS) using the equivalent of Xojo’s Pragma, but the resulting code is messy, and very hard to debug (I know. I’ve tried)
You can extrapolate anything you want from Marzipan but the tldr = It is no longer worthwhile for Apple to maintain two teams making the same app for two platforms in two different frameworks.
Indeed, today . But I have the feeling that as more and more framework call look more and more like UIKit, we may end up one of these days with a Mac framework which is underneath UIKit with AppKit as an additional layer, virtualized when possible.