New Music, Podcasts, and Books Applications Rumoured to Be Coming to MacOS ⇥ twitter.com
I am now fairly confident based on evidence I don’t wish to make public at this point that Apple is planning new (likely UIKit) Music, Podcasts, perhaps even Books, apps for macOS, to join the new TV app. I expect the four to be the next wave of Marzipan apps. Grain of salt, etc
Guilherme Rambo, 9to5Mac:
The new Books app will have a sidebar similar to the News app on the Mac, it will also feature a narrower title bar with different tabs for the Library, Book Store, and Audiobook Store. On the library tab, the sidebar will list the user’s Books, Audiobooks, PDFs and other collections, including custom ones.
The new Music, Podcasts, and TV apps will be made using Marzipan, Apple’s new technology designed to facilitate the porting of iPad apps to the Mac without too many code changes. It’s not clear whether the redesigned Apple Books app will also be made using the technology, but given that the redesign came to iOS first and its usage for the other apps, it’s likely that this new Books app will also be using UIKit.
The unrequited optimist in me is imagining a next generation of cross-platform app that feels completely platform native no matter where it’s running. But I have also used Music on the iPad and it’s not as good as its iPhone sibling — and those are just different versions of the same app on the same platform.
iTunes has seemingly been living on borrowed time for years. Between the launch of Apple Music and the separation of its components on iOS, it has seemed like only a matter of when, not if iTunes was to be killed on the Mac. And, as I have no plans to stop using my local music collection and manually syncing a subset of it to my iPhone, I am wary of what this could mean for my stubborn situation over the long term. Rambo says that his sources indicate that iTunes will be left in MacOS 10.15 for people like me, but what about two years from now, for example? I recognize that this is increasingly uncommon.