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UIKit was a beautiful design: a thin wrapper for touch handling over CoreAnimation's butter-smooth rendering. A layout engine built from first principles (the C
by layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
UIKit was a beautiful design: a thin wrapper for touch handling over CoreAnimation's butter-smooth rendering. A layout engine built from first principles (the Cassowary linear constraint solver) rather than some organically grown pile of hacks like the CSS box model or flexbox.
I'm fairly certain that the elegance and flexibility of the UIKit model, and its uncompromising focus on user experience over developer experience was a key contributor to iOS's success over its competitors.
I'm very sad that with SwiftUI Apple gave in to the tide and started catering to React devs with this gimmick immediate-mode framework on top of their existing retained-mode toolkit. The original NeXTSTEP engineers wouldn't have let this happen...
- favorited 6y ago> The original NeXTSTEP engineers wouldn't have let this happen... There are literally senior vice presidents, who I assume had to sign off on SwiftUI, who were NeXTSTEP engineers.
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoCraig Federighi also mentioned in an interview that the declarative model with bidirectional bindings was influenced by work at NeXT, referring to WebObjects.
- runawaybottle 6y agoAny links or details about this?
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoIt was just mentioned as an aside here: https://youtu.be/5ygYSdL42Zw?t=3039 https://youtu.be/5ygYSdL42Zw?t=3039.
- andrekandre 6y agoyea i somehow also found it similar to webobjects as well... though to be honest, i liked the bindings model in appkit better (much more component and visually driven)... shame it never came to be on iOS... swift ui is pretty cool, but somehow i feel like im laying out an html webpage instead of an app... maybe its just me
- Razengan 6y ago> The original NeXTSTEP engineers wouldn't have let this happen... Who? (because some of them are still at Apple, including Hair Force One :)