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SwiftUI is a big opportunity that Apple's not investing enough in, IMHO. It's good tech, and the reactive approach is excellent for many typical view-based need
by jph 4y ago
SwiftUI is a big opportunity that Apple's not investing enough in, IMHO. It's good tech, and the reactive approach is excellent for many typical view-based needs, but at the same time the docs are terribly lacking at how to handle any kind of edge cases.
Success to me looks like steering clear of SwiftUI for now, and advocating for Apple to hire documentation editors/leaders who can 1) create SwiftUI documentation of code examples for how to escape out of SwiftUI to handle more-complex cases, and 2) accelerate Xcode speedups of SwiftUI testing-and-instrumentation techniques such as View testing (e.g. ViewInspector) and integration testing vs. unit testing (e.g. reactive vs. dependency injection vs. extension tests vs. protocol tests etc.)
- coldcode 4y agoIt's a great idea but not fully baked yet. My former colleague is using it for internal apps and it seems to work fairly well (UI is not fancy), but not for anything going into the high volume apps, which has much more complex behavior (designers are asking for stupidly complex UI). It's much better in the upcoming OS since they added better navigation, but requires the latest OS, which is not supportive for many companies who try to support back at least 1 year. Will it ever be mainstream for iOS/MacOS? Maybe, if Apple would use it way more than they have so far, thus improvement by dogfooding. It is nice to build apps this way, but there are way too many bizarre gotchas still for most people unless you can live with more flexible designs.
- dpmitu 4y agoAt my company we've been slowly rewriting our UIKit app in SwiftUI. We were due for a rewrite when SwiftUI dropped. I'd say we're about 75% done. For those "stupidly complex UIs", SwiftUI just doesn't have enough hooks for customization. And the improvements are too slow. Using SwiftUI has been bitter-sweet. It feels like you just can't use it to craft a high quality app that doesn't look like a generic iOS app.
- WanderPanda 4y agoIs looking like a generic iOS app that bad?! Especially here on HN where the sentiment is pro plain html etc. a generic iOS UI should be well received
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wzwy 4y agoI’m new to HN. Why the inclination towards plainness? Is it because of performance or look or something else?
- JohnDeHope 4y agoI think a lot of hackers in general, not just on Hacker News, feel like a lot of UI concerns are just bikeshedding.
- consumer451 4y agoWhat do you think might be good counter examples of this not being the case? Maybe Instagram, Discord... I was going to say Robinhood, but the free trading might have been the real differentiator?
- kaba0 4y agoI think both Instagram and Discord is quite bad on the UX-front on iOS. Strangely enough Microsoft’s Outlook is quite decent while it still looks a bit distinct. It is not generally true of google’s iOS apps that I assume started using Flutter and it feels from time to time (mostly not-smooth scrolling)
- WanderPanda 4y agoI think Instagram is actually quite fabulous considering how navigating stories has become muscle memory for hundreds of millions of people. And even after they have been around for some time it is still satisfying to tap that profile pic with the ring around it.
- ozgung 4y ago> designers are asking for stupidly complex UI I think a mobile app should have a stupidly simple UI instead. Designers traditionally use a graphics program to design pixels. SwiftUI let’s you design layouts and components. Maybe designers should change how they design and start using SwiftUI as a design tool.
- azemetre 4y agoYour comment reminds me how asinine some Designs orgs have become at companies. Basically chasing fashion statements and demanding Engineers “just do it” with little consideration to the development, maintenance, and testing costs. Modern development, at some companies, can truly feel regressive at times.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y agoIt’s like Design for Machining, if you’re fabricating metal parts.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- int_19h 4y agoBecome? Frontend web development was always like that.
- bradgessler 4y agoThere’s a back port of the nav view at https://github.com/johnpatrickmorgan/NavigationBackport https://github.com/johnpatrickmorgan/NavigationBackport
- saagarjha 4y agoObviously, this should be something Apple invests into itself. But they're not going to do it because their culture does not value it; actually, they're often culturally blind to the fact that it might even be useful to provide this. With SwiftUI this kind of nearsightedness really hurts the platform.
- andrekandre 4y agoi think they have a very strong momentum to pushing os releases since... forever... decoupling is hard to do and i was shocked (and gratified) they backported async/await... but swiftui is ui-level, im guessing there must be some real pushback for backporting it... as a customer/developer, the whole os release every year is getting kind of old tbh...
- elpakal 4y ago> but at the same time the docs are terribly lacking at how to handle any kind of edge cases. I agree that Apple’s documentation needs help (this year’s improvements are a nice step) but can we really expect them to provide extensive documentation for handling edge cases (you’re telling me UIKit docs offer that)?
- heavyset_go 4y agoYes, I expect a trillion dollar company to invest in good documentation of their dev products.
- worik 4y agoMy feeling is that Apple hates the developers that develop the software that makes them rich. Forcing myself to be rational "hate" is probably too strong a word. If you are down the Apple cul-de-sac there is really no turning back. So investing in things like code examples for all of their API (there are a few, a very few) is a waste for Apple. It does not attract new developers and the old ones are stuck in the cul-de-sac.
- ummonk 4y agoI suspect you’re ascribing an unrealistic amount of intentionality and rationality to the prioritizations of a giant bureaucracy.
- diffeomorphism 4y agoThat sounds very different from what was written? The complaint was about "lacking ... any kind of" yet you write about "extensive documentation". There obviously is a trade off with how much you can/should expect, but "you cannot expect 9/10" is not a valid reply to "it currently is 3/10".
- elpakal 4y agowell thats good because I didn’t say “you cannot expect”, did I?
- darinf 4y agoSo wish they would decouple SwiftUI from the OS releases and opensource it!
- bhedgeoser 4y ago..and from the crappy excuse for an IDE that they distribute along with their build tooling.
- kaba0 4y agoI legit didn’t want to believe my eyes that it takes half a second after each code change before the IDE realizes whether a given change was correct or not. Also, you need clean builds quite often and I even got a “type inference times out” error message once which I haven’t seen in any PL ever even though I did dabble with quite a few static languages with even wider reaching type inference.
- pixel_tracing 4y agoWell this isn’t a runtime time language it’s a compile time language they’ve actually done some great work behind the scenes to enable live view debugging (Previews).
- choxi 4y agoYou can integrate UIKit into SwiftUI, I always found that to be a pretty general purpose fallback on any missing functionality in SwiftUI.
- abiro 4y agoThey should just acquihire the Big Mountain Studio guy. It’s crazy that you have to pay $300 for proper docs.
- NonNefarious 4y agoWe've been hearing this for years now, though. And we've seen SwiftUI takedowns on here before, a year or more ago, and even then SwiftUI wasn't exactly new. Meanwhile, my team has built an entire cross-platform desktop app in Qt with QML, which has been around for years and works refreshingly well. You're telling us that Apple, starting fresh and with several years under its belt now, still hasn't gotten its shit together with SwiftUI? And the word is that nobody at Apple even understands how Xcode works at this point. It's a patched-together shitshow that desperately needs a ground-up rewrite... but we all know how those go. Remember the "ground-up rewrite" of Finder we were promised several major OS releases ago? Still waiting.
- KerrAvon 4y agoWhat “word”? What “ground-up rewrite”? Do you really believe everything you read on the internet?
- NonNefarious 4y agoOr that I heard while working as an engineer at Apple for 10 years. WHOOPS
- lapcat 4y ago> Or that I heard while working as an engineer at Apple for 10 years. This seems extremely unlikely given your other uninformed comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32650545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32650545
- NonNefarious 4y ago
- lapcat 4y ago> Remember the "ground-up rewrite" of Finder we were promised several major OS releases ago? No? I've never heard of this. Do you have any citation for such a promise?