Bringing Gospel Library to macOS

[tpoehlmann]

With the announcement that Apple will be using its own silicon chips in its computers, now would be the time to begin transitioning the Gospel Library app to the Mac. There is something called the Universal App Quick Start Program which lets developers begin moving apps to the macOS now. See more details here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/ ... e-silicon/

[russellhltn]

Keep in mind that GL for Windows is due to an all-volunteer effort, back in the days when Windows was also on phones.

Unless a group of volunteers comes forward to do the same for Mac, I highly doubt that's going to happen.

[jdlessley]

Keep in mind that GL for Windows is due to an all-volunteer effort, back in the days when Windows was also on phones.

Unless a group of volunteers comes forward to do the same for Mac, I highly doubt that's going to happen.

With the end of support for Windows 10 phones ending on 10 December 2019 and the lack of necessary security updates I doubt Windows Gospel Library is long for this world. Security is a driving factor for lack of support for older iOS and Android operating systems and eventually there will be a decision to drop Windows Gospel Library. How that would affect any effort to bring together a volunteer development team for macOS does not look good.

[russellhltn]

With the end of support for Windows 10 phones ending on 10 December 2019 and the lack of necessary security updates I doubt Windows Gospel Library is long for this world.

I'd think that would depend on the volunteers. It is still useful for desktop users as well as a few other things (X-box?).

Either way, unless a group of MacOS developers appears that are willing to take on the project, it's not going to happen.

[sbradshaw]

Apple's new chips will be able to run iOS apps natively, with no code changes required – so technically no development work is necessary. However, there are a lot of things that could be done to provide a real macOS experience, rather than just an iOS app running in a window on the screen – particularly with Catalyst.

[mhenshaw]

I currently run the iOS version of Gospel Library (and several other Church apps) on my M1 MacBook with no issues. I would love a true MacOS version with a point-and-click menu-driven interface; but I find the iOS-Gospel-Library-on~a~MacBook experience to be pretty painless, all things considered.

[blm768]

In the (very) long run, I could see us saving some effort overall by using a framework like Apache Cordova or Tauri to write a single app that runs on basically all desktop and mobile platforms. That'd leave us with basically just a single codebase to maintain, but it'd be a tremendous effort to port everything over. At the very least, it'd be something to consider the next time a new platform pops up.

[sbradshaw]

In the (very) long run, I could see us saving some effort overall by using a framework like Apache Cordova or Tauri to write a single app that runs on basically all desktop and mobile platforms. That'd leave us with basically just a single codebase to maintain, but it'd be a tremendous effort to port everything over. At the very least, it'd be something to consider the next time a new platform pops up.

Frameworks for writing cross-platform apps require a lot of tradeoffs. All of the cross-platform apps I've used either feel out of place on the platform, or have poor performance – making them difficult to use. Counter-examples, if they exist, likely require more effort to get right than just building a separate app for each platform. It's difficult (and sometimes impossible) to tie into system APIs and components when there are too many layers of abstraction in between. In a way, Gospel Library Online is a cross-platform app, and fills part of the need, but because it runs in the browser, it doesn't attempt to look and feel like a native app.

[blm768]

Frameworks for writing cross-platform apps require a lot of tradeoffs. All of the cross-platform apps I've used either feel out of place on the platform, or have poor performance – making them difficult to use. Counter-examples, if they exist, likely require more effort to get right than just building a separate app for each platform. It's difficult (and sometimes impossible) to tie into system APIs and components when there are too many layers of abstraction in between. In a way, Gospel Library Online is a cross-platform app, and fills part of the need, but because it runs in the browser, it doesn't attempt to look and feel like a native app.

Being consistent with the platform would definitely be a challenge. Some apps, like Slack or Visual Studio Code, mostly just give up on that and do their own thing, which doesn't help users who prefer a true native experience, but it seems to work in some cases. In some ways, a unified experience between the Web app and the desktop/mobile app can be kind of nice.

But yes, it's trade-offs all the way down.

[mevans]

I would be really nice to have the church apps available on multiple platforms. Many years ago I worked on some commercial cross-platform apps. In one case, we had a common engine written in C that we could compile on Mac and Windows, but we implemented the GUI with native APIs on each platform. In another we used a C++ cross-platform library (we found a framework that actually handled platform differences quite well). I agree there are many tradeoffs. It's exciting to see several tools these days for cross-platform apps. One benefit I like for cross-platform is the reusable codebase. Depending on how the app works, you could have a substantial portion of stable, mostly bug-free code that's reusable across platforms. However, you'd still need to devote testing resources on each platform to make sure it's working properly...so even if the church leaders decided on a rewrite in one of these frameworks, they may decide they don't want to go to the expense of testing and publishing on all the platforms the frameworks can target.

russellhltn mentioned above about volunteer efforts to make things happen. Many years ago the church made a big effort to get volunteers to help with projects ("LDS Tech" was much more than a discussion board at that time), but apparently that didn't go as well as they had hoped, since all that seems to have been discontinued. So, I imagine it would take a lot of convincing for the decision makers to try embracing volunteer efforts again, even if it was just testing. There are archived beta test forums here on the discussion boards where they were trying to get helpful feedback from people testing, but they haven't used such forums in several years, so my guess is that didn't yield the desired results. With Apple making efforts to make iOS apps run on Macs and Microsoft making efforts to make Android apps run on Windows, maybe that's going to be the solution. mhenshaw's comment above indicates is working on a Mac.