81–90 of 257 posts
In 2022 developing software for iOS (now iPhoneOS) feels like you're working for Apple for free. You have to look closely to new requirements that they roll out every few months. You should use Apple products in your app or gtfo (e.g. login with Apple ID). You have to update your laptop every few years because Xcode (which is monumental PoS) requires new MacOS that your hardware doesn't support. And when you go throu…
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I wonder what is the technical justification for it too, if any. I mean, sure - you can save space by making it a dynamic library that is shipped with the OS but considering how immature it is, shipping a specific version of it with the app should be an option IMHO.
They can ship security updates themselves, which immediately fix all apps. Otherwise apps eventually never update. Also apps don't get the new "improved" styles etc if they don't have it in the system, which takes away the consistency Apple aims for. And then: It's Apple ...
People nowadays praise Apple for their hardware, mainly their silicon - not their software. Maybe it's time for Apple to shake things up and promote someone else to VP of Software engineering?
I’m with you, however mac os remain the best dekstop OS and iOS remain the best mobile one, even after all those years. So, they must be doing something right..
Android variants all have things that iOS can only dream of having in five years (notifications was a fun one), just spread very unevenly throughout manufacturers. Samsung currently has a very good Android build.
Calling it the best is very far fetched.
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I’m with you, however mac os remain the best dekstop OS and iOS remain the best mobile one, even after all those years. So, they must be doing something right..
I agree, in my experience, MacOS is one of the most reliable operating systems I've used in terms of lack of crashes or spurrious bugs; the most common bug I see is my mouse pointer dissapearing, which is fixed by opening the tasks view.
The author talks about SwiftUI on macOS, which I also find to be much much more buggy than what's on iOS. Very unexpected things happen, like items in a specific region in the App UI stop responding to clicks next time once you interact with them. However I find it fine on iOS and the issues are usually around Apple changing something in the behaviour of the UI or API and breaking it, then you need to fix it for spec…
The post didn't go into much detail as to why it seems to be so slow. Is SwiftUI recreating an entire UI's worth of components when a state update happens?
To me that’s the red flag. That an experienced game developer wasn’t able to properly troubleshoot down to the correct level, but ended up facing a black box and gave up.
If all you want is a declarative UI, just dump in ImGui and be done with it.
People burn an astounding amount of CPU and brain cycles pretending that UIs are something they are not. (i.e. "pure" functions) I hope Apple never goes the way Microsoft did with their fad UI toolkits that utterly destroyed developer trust in native Windows development (MFC, WinForms, WPF, UWP, WinUI, .Net MAUI). They are pretty wise for keeping SwiftUI be the "for kids" vanity UI toolkit to lure in React webdevs, w…
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Scroll direction is because everyone needs a mouse that you have to turn upside down to charge
The meme about the Magic Mouse charging upside down is really silly. There's a real good reason to be like that and you charge it once a month. In the case of Magic Mouse, there's really a case of holding it wrong too. People hold it wrong and thats why they also complain about the ergonomics. Truly excellent but misunderstood product.
Also if most people can't just pick up the mouse and use it, it's a broken design. In my particular case, it's so much smaller than my palm that I'm sure any grip would result in RSI.
Any UI code running on a modern CPU should take close to 0ms to update, no matter how many buttons, toggles, sliders and shadows. For the rendering part, it depends, I'd say it should take between 0.5 and 2ms with many layers, a lot or transparency and not much care for optimization.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most expensive part is usually text layout and rendering - text shaping is just really expensive and in the industry standard libraries it can take a long time to lay out a string, so you have to aggressively cache and do fancy things to get good performance. ASCII text is fast, though.