According to an audience with Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighiconducted by Cnetat WWDC , the first fourCatalystapps introduced to macOS last year are in for a design refresh .
Apple first demonstrated its technology to help bring iPad apps to the Mac — then call Marzipan — with macOS Mojave . When the OS shipped last fall , it include four new apps built using UIKit , the framework that developer use to construct iPhone and iPad apps : News , Home , Voice Memos , and Stocks . They were not well - obtain by Mac fan .
At WWDC this class , Apple introduced some new apps for mac OS Catalina , due for release later this twelvemonth . Music , television , Podcasts , Screen Time , and Find My are all new , and sport much better design than the tetrad of apps introduce last year . Apple shout out square updates to a number of other Mac apps , including Reminders , Notes , and Mail , but made no credit of the Catalyst apps bring in last year .
as luck would have it , Federighi say that updates are on the way .
“ They ’re getting improvements , ” Federighi enjoin . “ The underlie engineering has matured … Some of that is super low - point hooey . Some mass have dissected those apps and realized that they were sort of two halves : an AppKit one-half and a UIKit half , literally running in unlike processes . That ’s all commix now . This has become much more of a aboriginal Mac framework … So automatically , the apps we build up last year are promote .
Some have speculated that the hapless design of those four apps is a lifelike consequence of the UIKit frameworks used , and a disappointing sign of what we can wait from third - political party apps that utilise Catalyst to make the leap from iPad to Mac . According to Federighi , that ’s not so :
“ When I read some of the initial reviews of those apps , people were saying , ‘ plainly this technology is causing them to do thing that do n’t feel Mac - like . ’ frankly , 90 % of those were just decisions that designers made … People took that as ‘ this feels iOS - y ’ and therefore they thought it was a engineering thing . Actually , it was a architect preference . So part of [ the upgrade ] is we said we ’ve drive to co - develop with our user base around the aesthetics of the Mac experience . And so we made some adjustments to the apps . ”
We do n’t yet know what these new apps will look like in macOS Catalina , as the developer beta still sport the old app blueprint . Cnet quote Federighi as say , “ Wait for the public genus Beta . We ’re still tuning everything up . That ’s where it gets really sound . ”
The macOS Catalina public beta is expect this summertime .
