Designed for the Mac

As the Mac has become more popular the cohesiveness of the platform has declined. This is partly because the apps were simpler i.e. we didn't expect a single developer to support their app across of variety of devices and that the developers who chose to develop on the Mac had a similar goal: make software for the rest of us.

Over that same period our workflows have changed tremendously. Everything is connected to the internet and users expect to be able to access their data instantly, no matter the device they're using. No longer is a native Mac app enough. At a minimum you also need a mobile, as well as the services to authenticate and sync data between the apps.

In practice what this means is that rather than developing native apps and web-services to power them, the majority of applications have moved to being web apps entirely or to electron-style, web-app masquerading as a native apps.

The result is a computing experience that feels patched together, rather than designed. Each app has its own design language and way of doing things that is different from each other.

As a user of the Mac, there isn't much I can do to reverse the trend. But what I can do is to find and support smaller, simpler applications. Find and support applications that are designed *for* the Mac, not just *on* the Mac.