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I feel the same. Apple software quality certainly hasn’t increased. Years back I remember some apps crashing suddenly after updating MacOS. I checked the binary
by elcritch 1y ago
I feel the same. Apple software quality certainly hasn’t increased. Years back I remember some apps crashing suddenly after updating MacOS. I checked the binary and saw they’d started adding Swift.
Half a decade later it seems like it should be better and Swift stuff should be stabilized. But nope, I’ve had more little glitches in both iOS and MacOS. It’s hard to say it’s due to Swift, and not management priorities. Still it feels partially related to Swift.
Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design.
That and Swift de-emphasizes Obj-C message passing. I have a pet theory that message passing produces more robust GUI software that’s easier to adapt to complex needs.
- rcruzeiro 1y ago> Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design. This could not be furthest for the truth. The entire process of proposing a new language feature to getting it implemented and shipped is out in the open for everyone to participate/see. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution
- msie 1y agoToo many cooks!
- codr7 1y agoAnd no Steve Jobs to pull them down to earth.
- saagarjha 1y agoSteve Jobs, of course, was always involved in the details of programming languages targeting his platform.
- flohofwoe 1y agoHe would probably raise hell about the state of the new macOS Setting window though. How this thing made it through QA remains a mystery.
- codr7 1y agoI wasn't there so I can't say for sure. But my impression watching from the outside is that he had a finger in every pie.
- elcritch 1y agoHe really was involved. As I understand it Obj-C was championed by him. NextSTEP was largely software related: https://youtu.be/Hu-jvAWTZ9o?si=PalSP6POofiRuj3a https://youtu.be/Hu-jvAWTZ9o?si=PalSP6POofiRuj3a I still feel like GUI programming hasn’t progressed in the years since this. Actually they’ve regressed in many ways.
- mdhb 1y agoConversely, Dart does the exact same thing and is probably the best designed language I’ve ever come across
- SpaghettiCthulu 1y agoBest designed? Really? Support for something as basic as consistent integer types across platforms is non-existent.
- elcritch 1y agoWhat’s that got to do with coherent language design? Just because it’s somewhat open doesn’t mean it has consistent design. Then by all accounts Apple just forced through language changes needed for SwiftUI.
- rcruzeiro 1y agoI agree that that is the one counter example for the above. Apple forcing the closure syntax to better cater to SwiftUI left a sour taste in the mouths of an entire community.
- ardit33 1y agoIt is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKit to do advanced UI, and for what it is, SwiftUI is just not practical enough for cases that are not trivial. The trouble is that all new kids/engineer are learning it first, which means software wont get better. Apple need to improve it first, and I don't see advanced folks ditching UIKit anytime soon for advanced UI.
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoSeems like another case of the general trend in software development of easy things becoming easier and hard things becoming harder.
- firecall 1y agoThat’s a shame! I haven’t used Swift UI in a couple of years, but I always thought the basics of it were excellent. They got the declarative API foundations right I thought. Shame it’s still flakey. The preview used to crash constantly last time I used it.
- krzat 1y agoWhat baffles me the most is testability of SwiftUI. It simply does not exist.
- sunnybeetroot 1y agoThis is true, I wonder what Apple uses internally to test SwiftUI.
- interpol_p 1y agoI don't completely agree with you. Having used both SwiftUI and UIKit extensively, I value both of them and think they are both quite strong in different areas I have published a word game written entirely in SwiftUI [1], the effects and animations would have been much more difficult to do in UIKit, and the app itself would have been hairier to write and maintain [2]. I also track crashes, and this particular app has had four crashes in the past year, so I am very pleased with the stability That said, there are definitely times, as you say, where you have to drop to UIKit. For the word game mentioned above, I had to drop down to UIKit to observe low-level keyboard events in order to support hardware keyboard input without explicitly using a control that accepts text input SwiftUI is mature, it's pretty advanced — especially for graphics and animation heavy UI. It has limitations, particularly around advanced input event handling, as well as the application/scene lifecycle I plan to continue to use both UIKit and SwiftUI where they make sense. It's easy enough to bridge between them with UIHostingController and UIViewRepresentable [1] https://retrogram.app https://retrogram.app [2] Specific examples include: image and alpha masking is trivial in SwiftUI, Metal Shaders can be applied with a one-line modifier, gradients are easy and automatic, SwiftUI's Timeline+Canvas is very performant and more powerful than custom drawing with UIKit. Creating glows, textured text and images, blurs and geometry-based transitions is much easier in SwiftUI
- cevn 1y agoI have a good bug right now. My wife bought a Macbook Air. I use High DPI and she does not. It is impossible to switch between users in this situation, one of the core functionalities of the computer is just broken. Makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses these computers..
- eptcyka 1y agoNo one tests multi-user functionality, afaict.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoHas Apple been testing anything in the last many years?
- deergomoo 1y agoIt’s insanely buggy. My wife has two user accounts, one for her work and one for everything else, so she can switch out of the work user at the end of the day to put it out of her mind. She comes across bugs on the regular that I’ve never seen in 16 years of Mac use, but only when the other user account is logged in (i.e. quick user switching rather than a full log out). Stuff that user accounts shouldn’t even make any difference to, like the menu bar disappearing or rendering too far up so it’s half off screen. Save dialogs stop appearing. Windows that are open but appear to be rendering off screen somewhere. It’s wild. This is on a < 1 year old MacBook Air running the latest OS. It’s an absolute shambles.
- 1y ago
- frizlab 1y agoThat doesn’t mean much. Swift is new. Usable Swift even more so. All of the apps Apple propose have legacy. New apps from now (e.g. Invites) will be much more interesting.