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Author here! My best selling app Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/) is done in AppKit with Storyboards and it’s a pain to maintain (source here: http

by alin23 4y ago

Author here! My best selling app Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/) is done in AppKit with Storyboards and it’s a pain to maintain (source here: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar). So much that I finally created a SwiftUI menubar menu for it where I can add the more dynamic bits easily, and just leave the AppKit UI for static preferences stuff. Both AppKit and SwiftUI are good though, Lunar was the first time I was able to create a native UI from scratch and also release it without remorse. But I felt that the dynamic parts were much harder to reason about in AppKit, mostly because of the Delegate paradigm. I also have a preference for a not-so-native look which is much simpler to style using SwiftUI modifiers like clipShape, shadow etc.

jdmoreira 4y ago
> My best selling app Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/) is done in AppKit with Storyboards and it’s a pain to maintain (source here: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar) I just wanted to say that you can and most likely should use UIKit without touching interface builder. It's been over 5 years since I've used interface builder and I have no regrets. Just build your UI programatically relying mostly on UIStackViews, constraints and multiple levels of views embedded in views. Write your own helpers on top of UIKit to help you compose views in a more compact way. I basically have a dozen functions I re-use over and over and over to build complex UI from these simple primitives.
- agos 4y ago
  "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
  - jdmoreira 4y ago
    I'm probably 2 to 5x times more productive building UIs now than I ever was using interface builder. To say nothing about having proper version control and being able to abstract views much better. Will it be painful when you start? likely, but since you are exposed to everything your programmer brain will figure out how to solve the repetitive tasks very fast by building a helper function.
- vor_ 4y ago
  To me, writing UIs in code is one of the more terrible ideas to come out of modern iOS development.

by alin23 4y ago

jdmoreira 4y ago

> My best selling app Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/) is done in AppKit with Storyboards and it’s a pain to maintain (source here: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar) I just wanted to say that you can and most likely should use UIKit without touching interface builder. It's been over 5 years since I've used interface builder and I have no regrets. Just build your UI programatically relying mostly on UIStackViews, constraints and multiple levels of views embedded in views. Write your own helpers on top of UIKit to help you compose views in a more compact way. I basically have a dozen functions I re-use over and over and over to build complex UI from these simple primitives.

agos 4y ago
"just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
- jdmoreira 4y ago
  I'm probably 2 to 5x times more productive building UIs now than I ever was using interface builder. To say nothing about having proper version control and being able to abstract views much better. Will it be painful when you start? likely, but since you are exposed to everything your programmer brain will figure out how to solve the repetitive tasks very fast by building a helper function.
vor_ 4y ago
To me, writing UIs in code is one of the more terrible ideas to come out of modern iOS development.