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If the new macOS settings panel is indicative of SwiftUIs overall qualities, I really hope it wont be the future (eg if even Apple themselves can't get such a t

If the new macOS settings panel is indicative of SwiftUIs overall qualities, I really hope it wont be the future (eg if even Apple themselves can't get such a trivial thing like a settings panel right, I don't even know what the point of SwiftUI is after so many years in development)

ardit33 3y ago
Yup... I liked the old one much better. My guess, over time, they will fix the issues, but that's the typical hickups of a framework that is still too immature. It took Swift (the language) about 6-7 years to mature up. I think the language became 'mature' only around version 5.5. Whoever used it earlier, got to hit all kinds of weird issues and instabilities. SwiftUI, will have a similar arch. My opinion is that it is about 2-3 years to be mature enough, to replace UIKit altogether.
- novok 3y ago
  In iOS 2 UIKit was far more 'mature' of a framework than SwiftUI was, and it wasn't full of missing stair steps like basic navigation pushes working without it being a whole irritating song and dance, lazy loading table cells & navigation views, being able to hide the tab bar when you push a screen on one tab with things like "hidesBottomBarWhenPushed", etc. Overall I think SwiftUI when released, and even today in some corners, is a general overall theme of incompleteness with features available in iOS 2's UIKit. Did early iOS have it's irritating parts? For sure, but they were there for performance reasons mostly and it wasn't an 'incomplete' framework like SwiftUI is.
  - cvwright 3y ago
    Overall I really like SwiftUI. As a total iOS newbie when it was new, I don’t think I would have bothered if the only option was to slog through UIKit. But all the complaints about its incompleteness are spot-on. How did they think it was ok to launch without basic stuff like NavigationStack? Standard Apple “piss on my head and tell me it’s raining”.
SebastianKra 3y ago
I don't get why people have zeroed in on the Settings app. Outside of some very specific sections, it's fine. Meanwhile, the Home app can't be closed when viewing an accessory because they made it a modal, the Music app sometimes can't be searched because the search field looses focus on every keypress, and the AppStore may crash outright.
- mk12 3y ago
  The Settings app is inexcusably bad. On my M1 Pro MBP there is reliably 500-1000ms delay between clicking a section and waiting for it to appear.
  - shilgapira 3y ago
    That was true in a significant number of preference pages in the old Settings.app as well. It's probably the same code paths under the hood of the new UI.
    - mk12 3y ago
      I don't doubt your experience but that doesn't match mine. Third-party preference panes were slow for me in the old app, but I never noticed any lag with the standard ones.
- wpm 3y ago
  Because I need the Settings app to work. I’m not choosing burger toppings, I’m often in there to troubleshoot. I can’t have an app that straight up lies to me about my network or refuses to respond to button presses I know it saw (WiFi “Details…” button won’t show anything if you’ve already pressed it and closed it that session, have to quit and relaunch). SwiftUIs text rendering also looks like ass, but that also could be the result of the choice of grey on grey the design B-team in charge of the redesign chose for text boxes. I do agree though that the Home app is far worse. It sucks on iOS and they just copy pasted it over, and that UI with a mouse cursor is just painful and ugly. Unredeemable software.
  - 3y ago
brailsafe 3y ago
But... it's not at all indicative of SwiftUIs overall qualities. Whoever developed the new settings app made choices that were not great using a framework that at this point could very easily support a better one, or the original one. Even down to the toggle control using more of an iOS style, that's just a SwiftUI modifier that can either render more traditional macOS style checkboxes or a toggle switch. It definitely has some tricky bits to get used to, some strange paradigms, but it's actually pretty good atm.

ardit33 3y ago

Yup... I liked the old one much better. My guess, over time, they will fix the issues, but that's the typical hickups of a framework that is still too immature. It took Swift (the language) about 6-7 years to mature up. I think the language became 'mature' only around version 5.5. Whoever used it earlier, got to hit all kinds of weird issues and instabilities. SwiftUI, will have a similar arch. My opinion is that it is about 2-3 years to be mature enough, to replace UIKit altogether.

novok 3y ago
In iOS 2 UIKit was far more 'mature' of a framework than SwiftUI was, and it wasn't full of missing stair steps like basic navigation pushes working without it being a whole irritating song and dance, lazy loading table cells & navigation views, being able to hide the tab bar when you push a screen on one tab with things like "hidesBottomBarWhenPushed", etc. Overall I think SwiftUI when released, and even today in some corners, is a general overall theme of incompleteness with features available in iOS 2's UIKit. Did early iOS have it's irritating parts? For sure, but they were there for performance reasons mostly and it wasn't an 'incomplete' framework like SwiftUI is.
- cvwright 3y ago
  Overall I really like SwiftUI. As a total iOS newbie when it was new, I don’t think I would have bothered if the only option was to slog through UIKit. But all the complaints about its incompleteness are spot-on. How did they think it was ok to launch without basic stuff like NavigationStack? Standard Apple “piss on my head and tell me it’s raining”.

SebastianKra 3y ago

I don't get why people have zeroed in on the Settings app. Outside of some very specific sections, it's fine. Meanwhile, the Home app can't be closed when viewing an accessory because they made it a modal, the Music app sometimes can't be searched because the search field looses focus on every keypress, and the AppStore may crash outright.

mk12 3y ago
The Settings app is inexcusably bad. On my M1 Pro MBP there is reliably 500-1000ms delay between clicking a section and waiting for it to appear.
- shilgapira 3y ago
  That was true in a significant number of preference pages in the old Settings.app as well. It's probably the same code paths under the hood of the new UI.
  - mk12 3y ago
    I don't doubt your experience but that doesn't match mine. Third-party preference panes were slow for me in the old app, but I never noticed any lag with the standard ones.
wpm 3y ago
Because I need the Settings app to work. I’m not choosing burger toppings, I’m often in there to troubleshoot. I can’t have an app that straight up lies to me about my network or refuses to respond to button presses I know it saw (WiFi “Details…” button won’t show anything if you’ve already pressed it and closed it that session, have to quit and relaunch). SwiftUIs text rendering also looks like ass, but that also could be the result of the choice of grey on grey the design B-team in charge of the redesign chose for text boxes. I do agree though that the Home app is far worse. It sucks on iOS and they just copy pasted it over, and that UI with a mouse cursor is just painful and ugly. Unredeemable software.
- 3y ago

brailsafe 3y ago

But... it's not at all indicative of SwiftUIs overall qualities. Whoever developed the new settings app made choices that were not great using a framework that at this point could very easily support a better one, or the original one. Even down to the toggle control using more of an iOS style, that's just a SwiftUI modifier that can either render more traditional macOS style checkboxes or a toggle switch. It definitely has some tricky bits to get used to, some strange paradigms, but it's actually pretty good atm.