If Macs had touch screens (as I and many others had been requesting for over a decade now) porting iOS apps to the Mac would just be a recompile. No mouse. No cursor. No translating between various SDKs and user interface idioms. Just compile your app as usual and support variable screen sizes and you are done.
Here’s the full transcript of what SJ said (2010) about Macs with Touch screens:
“We’ve done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.
It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. it doesn’t work, it’s ergonomically terrible.
Touch surfaces want to be horizontal, hence pads.
For a notebook, that’s why we’re perfected our multitouch trackpads over the years, because that’s the best way we’ve found to get multitouch into a notebook.
We’ve also, in essence, put a trackpad — a multitouch track pad on the mouse with our magic mouse. And we’ve recently come out with a pure play trackpad as well for our desktop users.
So this is how we're going to use multitouch on our Mac products because this (he points at someone touch laptop screen) doesn’t work.”
I have a massive vertical touch screen at work (you stand in front of it) and it is fine in regard to fatigue. I can well understand though, if you have an iMac on your desk then having to abnormally bend the wrist for a touch screen would result in fatigue in a very short time.
They indeed gave this as the reason. I do however disagree with this reasoning when looking at laptops or 2-in-1s. Having used the Surface Pro I have to say that there is no problem in using a vertical touch surface, I use it all the time. When coming back to a regular laptop I sometimes want to touch the screen for certain actions, as it is just more convenient. If Apple added a touch screen to the MacBooks I would see that as a plus. Also, Apple nowadays makes the Smart Keyboard for the iPad, making it a vertical touch surface. If this is so ergonomically terrible, why does it exist? I do agree that for desktops, which are further away from you and also have much larger screens there is a chance of fatigue.
I read all that, and came away with Catayst isn’t receiving updates (frequently) to improve the experience of converting iOS Apps to MacOS Apps. That’s a bit worrisome...
It seems obvious that “just checking a box” is B.S. for most developers, if they want to give their users a quality experience.
For many devs it might be better to develop web apps that work anywhere....
Just another example where Bean-Counter Cook has under resources software projects at Apple. Hopefully that's changing a little bit with Ive gone.
Comments
Also, Apple nowadays makes the Smart Keyboard for the iPad, making it a vertical touch surface. If this is so ergonomically terrible, why does it exist?
I do agree that for desktops, which are further away from you and also have much larger screens there is a chance of fatigue.