Project Catalyst Reveals Apple's Struggle With The Future Of The Mac

iOS developers must look within themselves to build great Mac apps.

- Jason Snell

There’s an old joke about a bad writer blaming his tools—a sad excuse that it was the typewriter and not poor writing skill that was to blame. When macOS Mojave was announced last year, featuring four apps that originated on iOS and had been moved to the Mac (go.macworld.com/ move) by something we now call Catalyst, many of us were quick to blame Catalyst for the strange design quirks of those apps, which seemed simplified in ways that were jarring.

Recent statements by Apple software head Craig Federighi, including his interview with John Gruber (go.macworld. com/grbr) during WWDC and a subsequent interview (go.macworld.com/sbsq) with Jason Hiner of CNet, make it worth revisiting that assumption.

“When I read some of the initial reviews of those apps, people were saying,‘Obviously this technology is causing them to do things that don’t feel Mac-like,’” Federighi told CNet. “Honestly, 90 percent of those were just decisions that designers made…People took that as ‘this feels iOS-y’ and therefore they thought it was a technology thing. Actually, it was a designer preference.”

“The apps were bad because we made bad design choices” is a bit of a weird defense. Is Federighi just defendingCatalyst and his engineers (at, I might point out, the expense of his designers), or is there more to this? I suspect it’s a little of both, as Apple tries to create a bridge between two very different platforms at the same time that it’s tinkering with the wholesale redesign of what it means to be a well-designed Mac app.

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