<story><title>Inspecting Web Views in macOS</title><url>https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnfn</author><text>Wow. I always thought the argument in favor of using web technologies on the desktop was that cross-platform became easier. And yet here is an example of the most unambiguously single-platform app I can possibly imagine, and under the hood it uses web - and React of all things! Crazy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>avianlyric</author><text>It has the advantage of allowing the iCloud team to update the preferences panel without the need to release macOS updates. Allowing them to decouple iCloud updates from the macOS release cycle.&lt;p&gt;Sure you could use something like SwiftUI and create some simple DSL to dynamically build a native UI. But at that point you’re basically building a slightly crappier, less flexible version of HTML. So might as well use HTML+CSS and take advantage of the decades of learnings it represents.&lt;p&gt;I’ve personally used a similar approach to power a banks fraud warning UI. Made it possible for us to quickly iterate and change our UI as various strategies used by fraudsters evolved. Meant we could go from see a new issue, to updating our ML models and deploying new UI in under a week, which is faster than the app review process.</text></comment>
<story><title>Inspecting Web Views in macOS</title><url>https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>johnfn</author><text>Wow. I always thought the argument in favor of using web technologies on the desktop was that cross-platform became easier. And yet here is an example of the most unambiguously single-platform app I can possibly imagine, and under the hood it uses web - and React of all things! Crazy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oefrha</author><text>A settings view that is largely shared between macOS System Preferences, iOS Settings and icloud.com is not single-platform. Windows Settings uses React Native for the same reason.[1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=30384494&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=30384494&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edit: mention iOS Settings.</text></comment>