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Does SwiftUI really count as native on the Mac? My experience is that Apple has not invested enough for that to be true. Apple is Apple, so when they say jump,
by n8cpdx 4y ago
Does SwiftUI really count as native on the Mac? My experience is that Apple has not invested enough for that to be true. Apple is Apple, so when they say jump, developers jump. But if any other company tried pulling what they’re pulling with SwiftUI, they’d be getting a swift kick in the behind by their dev community. It feels like their UWP moment; nice idea, bad execution.
This isn’t to criticize the project; I like and want to see more native Mac software, I just feel very disappointed with Apple’s leadership in this area. A native Mac app should almost automatically be without a doubt better than the Electron version, but at least with SwiftUI that isn’t happening.
Regardless, inconsistencies between AppKit on Mac and SwiftUI on Mac are enough to make it not native, IMO.
Kudos to the author for taking advantage of CoreML, one of the areas where native software shines on Apple platforms.
- fooker 4y agoThat is the point of frameworks. Apple can keep improving SwiftUI and everyone using it will benefit with minimal effort, if not automatically. It does not have to be perfect, there just has to be constant progress.
- n8cpdx 4y agoThat statement applies equally to any web-based framework, any native framework, Java, appkit, UWP, Silverlight… Apple could have invested in SwiftUI on Mac to the same extent they did on iOS, and things would look very different. SwiftUI as currently implemented on Mac breaks enough platform conventions and is, relative to existing native UI, slow and buggy enough to IMO not more native than any other cross platform UI solution.
- galad87 4y agoWhich UI conventions are broken? SwiftUI mostly uses the standard AppKit widgets, then it's up to the developer to use it or to customise everything and make a monster out of it. The main "issue" is that it's much easier to customise things in SwiftUI.
- GeekyBear 4y ago> That statement applies equally to any web-based framework, any native framework, Java, appkit, UWP, Silverlight… Except for the part where Apple doesn't hype and then quickly abandon developer APIs the way some other companies do. AppKit, for instance, has been continually iterated on for three decades now. Since Apple has been very clear that SwiftUI is "where the puck is going", I doubt it will be abandoned as quickly as Google or Microsoft's "future of platform development strategy" of the month.
- dwaite 4y ago> Does SwiftUI really count as native on the Mac? My experience is that Apple has not invested enough for that to be true https://blog.timac.org/2022/1005-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-ios16/ https://blog.timac.org/2022/1005-state-of-swift-and-swiftui-... iOS 16.0 included 226 SwiftUI apps. Several highly promoted features (such as complications on the Lock Screen and widgets) are now only possible using SwiftUI. Some new SwiftUI only frameworks (like Swift Charts) developed directly from internal Apple teams creating new SwiftUI apps, and factoring out useful components. > Regardless, inconsistencies between AppKit on Mac and SwiftUI on Mac are enough to make it not native, IMO. SwiftUI is not a wrapper around AppKit controls, although that is/was how some SwiftUI views are authored. Likewise, some recently added AppKit controls are actually wrapped SwiftUI views. There is an ongoing effort to unify macOS and iPadOS which became much more noticeable at the UX level in macOS 11. It is unfortunately difficult to determine which inconsistencies are deficiencies in SwiftUI and which are the "legacy" behavior of AppKit. Since SwiftUI is a system framework, we only see its evolution in spurts on an annual schedule.
- nier 4y agoUWP stands for Universal Windows Platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform
- LASR 4y agoUWP failed and continues to fail because Microsoft themselves are not invested into it. Most of the apps that come out of Microsoft use something else. Eg: Vscode, Teams etc, Office etc. It’s not the case with Apple at least from what I can see publicly. Not an Apple fanboy by any stretch. But I’ve been burned by Microsoft when they introduced Silverlight as the platform for developing Windows Phone 7 apps. Only to deprecate it in Windows Phone 8. A lot of developers were not happy at that time.