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My experience with SwiftUI on the Mac is that it still needs a lot of work. Documentation is poor. Performance can be bad if you do things in a straightforward

My experience with SwiftUI on the Mac is that it still needs a lot of work. Documentation is poor. Performance can be bad if you do things in a straightforward way. Supporting older versions of the OS is quite painful etc.

throwaway2037 2y ago
> Documentation is poor. This is the first I heard about SwiftUI. Maybe I am mixed up and docs are excellent for Swift, but not SwiftUI?
- cageface 2y ago
  Yes. Two different things. The SwiftUI docs are mostly just listings of functions and not much explanation of how to use them.
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    Plus, half of the official examples are given to you as a full Xcode project that you must download and import
- biztos 2y ago
  I recently built a small app using SwiftUI. It was my first, and pretty simple. The documentation was absolutely maddening.. Half the time the Apple docs referred to a previous version. “Do this thing in XCode” often included screenshots of UIs that don’t exist in the current version of XCode. Examples I found on Stackoverflow or random blogs were usually no longer applicable. It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings, but the annoyance of finding my way there made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwifUI, especially if I wasn’t working alone.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Thanks for the follow-up. These types of anec-data are the best part of HN. > It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings I know the feeling from Qt. I think Gtk and many other GUI toolkits use the equivalent of VStack and HStack to make resizable GUIs. Some GUI toolkits try to avoid this problem by using a grid layout, but it is more rare. EDIT > made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwiftUI From your experience, what GUI toolkit would you prefer? And, it would help to know what is your target UI platform.
    - cageface 2y ago
      I’ve had overall very positive experiences with Flutter. If I wasn’t concerned about Google’s long term commitment to it I’d use it for everything.
      - biztos 2y ago
        Did you do cross-platform and if so, did you use the same UI style for everything? Today I was making a list of reasons/excuses for using Material Design on Mac… which I guess would make some people mad, but it might work for an enterprise product.
        cageface 2y ago
        Yes cross platform and the same style. I don't think this matters much to users today. They're used to it. That said I did do a fair bit of my own theming. The Flutter Material widgets are actually pretty customizable and I'm not a big fan of vanilla Material. https://plastaq.com/minimoon https://plastaq.com/minimoon
    - biztos 2y ago
      I don’t have much app experience, I’m mostly a back-end guy trying to build some prototypes and (hopefully) one product. I’m not in a position to give anyone advice, but I’d love to find SwiftUI but cross-platform and usable from anything other than XCode (well maybe not Ed…) and native GUI and a pony. For my product I need to support Mac, Windows and eventually iOS/iPadOS. For prototypes iOS is enough. I don’t mind learning new languages for this, but ideally there would be some advantage in knowing the language itself. I’ve been looking at lots of frameworks over the past month. The most tempting thing so far is Flutter, but I have nagging doubts: because it’s not native UI, I worry about that being a no-go for some large customer down the road, and also about alienating power users. I looked at React Native but it’s not very good for desktop yet as far as I could tell (and the demo app from the documentation doesn’t work, which is a bad sign). Which is too bad because I was impressed with Expo, if I just needed phones I’d probably use that. I looked at Avalonia but it has the opposite problem. Today I’m looking at Tauri for the Nth time: at least I could improve my Rust, and it seems to have momentum. Doing the UI in a web view is kinda sad, though, after trying SwiftUI. Just building multiple apps is not realistic, I’m a solo dev and want to get this to market in my lifetime, and it only makes sense if I have both Mac and Windows. Very happy to hear recommendations from people who have done this!
bobajeff 2y ago
Documentation remains the number one reason I personally don't make Android apps and why electron/web apps are the way to go for most GUI apps these days.
- cageface 2y ago
  Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like having good, bug free, modern and well documented desktop APIs is a priority for anyone anymore.

throwaway2037 2y ago

> Documentation is poor. This is the first I heard about SwiftUI. Maybe I am mixed up and docs are excellent for Swift, but not SwiftUI?

cageface 2y ago
Yes. Two different things. The SwiftUI docs are mostly just listings of functions and not much explanation of how to use them.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  Plus, half of the official examples are given to you as a full Xcode project that you must download and import
biztos 2y ago
I recently built a small app using SwiftUI. It was my first, and pretty simple. The documentation was absolutely maddening.. Half the time the Apple docs referred to a previous version. “Do this thing in XCode” often included screenshots of UIs that don’t exist in the current version of XCode. Examples I found on Stackoverflow or random blogs were usually no longer applicable. It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings, but the annoyance of finding my way there made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwifUI, especially if I wasn’t working alone.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Thanks for the follow-up. These types of anec-data are the best part of HN. > It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings I know the feeling from Qt. I think Gtk and many other GUI toolkits use the equivalent of VStack and HStack to make resizable GUIs. Some GUI toolkits try to avoid this problem by using a grid layout, but it is more rare. EDIT > made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwiftUI From your experience, what GUI toolkit would you prefer? And, it would help to know what is your target UI platform.
  - cageface 2y ago
    I’ve had overall very positive experiences with Flutter. If I wasn’t concerned about Google’s long term commitment to it I’d use it for everything.
    - biztos 2y ago
      Did you do cross-platform and if so, did you use the same UI style for everything? Today I was making a list of reasons/excuses for using Material Design on Mac… which I guess would make some people mad, but it might work for an enterprise product.
      - cageface 2y ago
        Yes cross platform and the same style. I don't think this matters much to users today. They're used to it. That said I did do a fair bit of my own theming. The Flutter Material widgets are actually pretty customizable and I'm not a big fan of vanilla Material. https://plastaq.com/minimoon https://plastaq.com/minimoon
  - biztos 2y ago
    I don’t have much app experience, I’m mostly a back-end guy trying to build some prototypes and (hopefully) one product. I’m not in a position to give anyone advice, but I’d love to find SwiftUI but cross-platform and usable from anything other than XCode (well maybe not Ed…) and native GUI and a pony. For my product I need to support Mac, Windows and eventually iOS/iPadOS. For prototypes iOS is enough. I don’t mind learning new languages for this, but ideally there would be some advantage in knowing the language itself. I’ve been looking at lots of frameworks over the past month. The most tempting thing so far is Flutter, but I have nagging doubts: because it’s not native UI, I worry about that being a no-go for some large customer down the road, and also about alienating power users. I looked at React Native but it’s not very good for desktop yet as far as I could tell (and the demo app from the documentation doesn’t work, which is a bad sign). Which is too bad because I was impressed with Expo, if I just needed phones I’d probably use that. I looked at Avalonia but it has the opposite problem. Today I’m looking at Tauri for the Nth time: at least I could improve my Rust, and it seems to have momentum. Doing the UI in a web view is kinda sad, though, after trying SwiftUI. Just building multiple apps is not realistic, I’m a solo dev and want to get this to market in my lifetime, and it only makes sense if I have both Mac and Windows. Very happy to hear recommendations from people who have done this!

bobajeff 2y ago

Documentation remains the number one reason I personally don't make Android apps and why electron/web apps are the way to go for most GUI apps these days.

cageface 2y ago
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like having good, bug free, modern and well documented desktop APIs is a priority for anyone anymore.