How Raycast standardises native Mac design of plugins

Raycast is an awesome tool for Mac. It is a command bar to do all kinds of things. Things like searching for files, opening applications. But also more complex things like converting images, translating text.

The brilliant thing about Raycast is that it just seems to melt away into the operating system. It looks exactly like MacOS Spotlight. But with one big difference.

It can be extended.

And one of the things I like is how Raycast has deliberately thought about the OS-native user experience.

How do you make it possible for developers to create a plugin, but not mess up the UI? After all, most developers are horrible designers.

Raycast severely limits developers. They make available just a couple of components. And give developers a super developer-friendly way of integrating these components in their plugins. Not requiring any Swift, they allow developers to write their plugins in javascript, and build the UI using ReactUI components. Those components in turn render to native Mac components, blended into the application.

I love it. I love it because it is deliberately unobtrusive. Deliberately gets out of my way.

Listen to their podcast episode where they explain this, or checkout the Raycast UI documentation