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I fell in love with SwiftUI the day it was announced, but as a solo dev I still haven't been able to make a full app with it yet, mostly because of the lack of

I fell in love with SwiftUI the day it was announced, but as a solo dev I still haven't been able to make a full app with it yet, mostly because of the lack of documentation, and the gaps where you still need to drop down to AppKit/UIKit. I went through Visual Basic, .NET, WPF, Cocoa, and other random frameworks all professing to be the promised panacea for UI, but I think SwiftUI+SwiftData is the best environment ever.. IF only it could reach its full potential, i.e. do everything that Apple's "legacy" APIs can do. I even tried using SwiftUI for games: https://i.imgur.com/5aTWbft.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/5aTWbft.mp4 The biggest/worst hurdle in the "modern" dev experience is Apple's insistence on a yearly update cycle and the way they advertise those updates: You have to wait for the next WWDC and suffer through videos of uncanny-valley presenters, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that fixes the shit that was bothering you since the last WWDC. 3rd-party sites like hackingwithswift.com & swiftwithmajid.com provide invaluable info that Apple's own docs should. At least the Swift language has been getting more regular updates since it went open source. There's no way I'd dare to take on a full Apple-platform app project alone on my own, but I've started dabbling in it again thanks to AI: Codex even converted an old app I made in Visual Basic 900 years ago and had it running in SwiftUI within minutes! I've even tried to get AI to sift through the WWDC video transcripts so I won't have to waste my mortal lifespan on that.

steve1977 3mo ago
> There's no way I'd dare to take on a full Apple-platform app project alone on my own And that's really sad, because earlier Mac OS X (and even OPENSTEP to a degree) was an Eldorado for boutique developers, not least due to frameworks like Cocoa and Objective-C (despite all the hate it seems to get). If you knew C, it was not hard to grasp Objective-C (at least it was much easier than say C++ and MFC on the Windows side of things).
- Razengan 3mo ago
  That's actually why I jumped from Windows to Mac in the first place! My first Apple purchase was an iPad I got for my aunt, and I loved how streamlined yet powerful it was so I installed a VM on Windows to dabble in iOS development, and fell in love with the sheer consistency of macOS, iOS and their APIs. This was during the era when Microsoft was still figuring out whether to keep the Start Menu and replace the whole Windows UX with a tablet UI, so it was an easy jump. Almost never looked back, and whenever I do I'm glad I jumped. Then came Swift and I loved it, but then it took literal years to catch up with everything you could do in Objective-C with the Apple APIs. SwiftUI is having the same problem but for much longer :(
  - viktorcode 3mo ago
    > Then came Swift and I loved it, but then it took literal years to catch up with everything you could do in Objective-C with the Apple APIs. I don't get this part. You can literally rewrite Obj-C code verbatim in Swift and it will work. The only missing part is C macros.
    - Razengan 3mo ago
      > You can literally rewrite Obj-C code verbatim in Swift and it will work. It took a while to get there. They didn't have native Swift APIs for some things like URIs etc until later.
zer0x4d 3mo ago
Yeah I don't really understand their insistence on these videos. I don't have the time to watch an incredibly hard to watch present babywalk me through the code, hoping I'd catch one modifier I missed that fixes the issue. Just write some docs for god's sake.
- sunnybeetroot 3mo ago
  They update the docs every year. The videos are for people who want a demonstration instead of reading docs and trying things manually to see the result.
  - zer0x4d 3mo ago
    There are lots of detail in the videos that are never mentioned in docs
  - andrekandre 3mo ago
    > They update the docs every year. it doesn't help that docs are utter garbage... the fact everything is slopped into a video is so annoying
CharlesW 3mo ago
> There's no way I'd dare to take on a full Apple-platform app project alone on my own, but I've started dabbling in it again thanks to AI: Codex even converted an old app I made in Visual Basic 900 years ago and had it running in SwiftUI within minutes! You may like my project https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (FOSS). I was in the same place a year ago, and initially created Axiom as a private skills suite before deciding that it was too helpful not to share.
Razengan 3mo ago
P.S. Re: AI, I don't mean outright generating entire apps from a single sentence (except for conversions of private tools), but using AI to navigate Apple's obtuse documentation and edge-case APIs, i.e. "how to do this"

steve1977 3mo ago

> There's no way I'd dare to take on a full Apple-platform app project alone on my own And that's really sad, because earlier Mac OS X (and even OPENSTEP to a degree) was an Eldorado for boutique developers, not least due to frameworks like Cocoa and Objective-C (despite all the hate it seems to get). If you knew C, it was not hard to grasp Objective-C (at least it was much easier than say C++ and MFC on the Windows side of things).

Razengan 3mo ago
That's actually why I jumped from Windows to Mac in the first place! My first Apple purchase was an iPad I got for my aunt, and I loved how streamlined yet powerful it was so I installed a VM on Windows to dabble in iOS development, and fell in love with the sheer consistency of macOS, iOS and their APIs. This was during the era when Microsoft was still figuring out whether to keep the Start Menu and replace the whole Windows UX with a tablet UI, so it was an easy jump. Almost never looked back, and whenever I do I'm glad I jumped. Then came Swift and I loved it, but then it took literal years to catch up with everything you could do in Objective-C with the Apple APIs. SwiftUI is having the same problem but for much longer :(
- viktorcode 3mo ago
  > Then came Swift and I loved it, but then it took literal years to catch up with everything you could do in Objective-C with the Apple APIs. I don't get this part. You can literally rewrite Obj-C code verbatim in Swift and it will work. The only missing part is C macros.
  - Razengan 3mo ago
    > You can literally rewrite Obj-C code verbatim in Swift and it will work. It took a while to get there. They didn't have native Swift APIs for some things like URIs etc until later.

zer0x4d 3mo ago

Yeah I don't really understand their insistence on these videos. I don't have the time to watch an incredibly hard to watch present babywalk me through the code, hoping I'd catch one modifier I missed that fixes the issue. Just write some docs for god's sake.

sunnybeetroot 3mo ago
They update the docs every year. The videos are for people who want a demonstration instead of reading docs and trying things manually to see the result.
- zer0x4d 3mo ago
  There are lots of detail in the videos that are never mentioned in docs
- andrekandre 3mo ago
  > They update the docs every year. it doesn't help that docs are utter garbage... the fact everything is slopped into a video is so annoying

CharlesW 3mo ago

> There's no way I'd dare to take on a full Apple-platform app project alone on my own, but I've started dabbling in it again thanks to AI: Codex even converted an old app I made in Visual Basic 900 years ago and had it running in SwiftUI within minutes! You may like my project https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (FOSS). I was in the same place a year ago, and initially created Axiom as a private skills suite before deciding that it was too helpful not to share.

Razengan 3mo ago

P.S. Re: AI, I don't mean outright generating entire apps from a single sentence (except for conversions of private tools), but using AI to navigate Apple's obtuse documentation and edge-case APIs, i.e. "how to do this"