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Why I quit using SwiftUI

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Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#201

Post by Nullabillity »

mrtksn wrote: post #93
AlotOfReading wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on mice before and frankly I have no clue what sort of technical requirement would lead to an upside down charging requirement and disabling the functionality in the meantime. Can you explain what that reason might be? 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.

Simple, the front is not thick enough to accommodate a common port like USB or Lightning. If you put it on the sides, it defies the purpose. Changing the design to accommodate a port in the front doesn't make sense because the primary function of the device is to act as a human-computer interface and optimising the design for that purpose is paramount, charging is not a primary function but something that we have to…

> Simple, the front is not thick enough to accommodate a common port like USB or Lightning.

Then fire Jony Ive and make the front thicker! This isn't exactly rocket surgery.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#202

Post by stephc_int13 »

saagarjha wrote: post #150
kevingadd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience working with IMGUI-style libraries, it's definitely feasible to perform full layout and rendering for complex UI in 1-2ms at most. For simpler applications it should be basically free. It's depressing that people are willing to accept complex, slow layout APIs at this point considering it's been possible for stuff to be fast for a long time. Perhaps surprisingly, the most expensive part is usually te…

Whenever people come up with low numbers like that their mental model is really what they see as sticking some ASCII on the screen with a couple of colors blitted in. Doing text rendering that is actually good, transparency, shadows, the things that make a UI worth using makes things somewhat more expensive. It doesn't have to be overbearingly expensive–modern computers are fast, after all–but it's definitely going t…

No, I am talking about real UI update and rendering, with all the complications, bells and whistles.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#203

Post by hota_mazi »

NonNefarious wrote: post #168
hota_mazi wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS still doesn't let you place icons anywhere you want on the home screen, though. It's been fifteen years. Desktops, and Android, have allowed you to do this for decades.

You mean it forces them to be lined up in a grid? Otherwise, I have no idea what you're on about.

You cannot put an icon anywhere you want on the home screen.

Icons are lined up left to right, in a row.

You need to insert icons inside a row and then all the other icons to its right will be pushed right and/or down.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#204

Post by stephc_int13 »

int_19h wrote: post #158
kevingadd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience working with IMGUI-style libraries, it's definitely feasible to perform full layout and rendering for complex UI in 1-2ms at most. For simpler applications it should be basically free. It's depressing that people are willing to accept complex, slow layout APIs at this point considering it's been possible for stuff to be fast for a long time. Perhaps surprisingly, the most expensive part is usually te…

I don't think it's very surprising once one considers all the complications of Unicode text layout: combining marks, ligatures, right-to-left etc.

Well, text layout is not trivial. But computers are incredibly fast when dealing with small amount of data.

I don't see why all of text layout calculations could not be done at maximum speed with everything in L1. Probably with quite a few branch miss-prediction, but still.

The amount of work you can achieve in 1ms on a modern CPU is astonishing.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#205

Post by bdougherty »

solomatov wrote: post #16
dmitriid wrote: post #6

> I profiled the whole thing and discovered several things. First, the view provided by the selectable object was completely recreated with every redraw. I gained some performance back by caching it, but things remained barely usable. That... is exactly the same thing with React. You don't notice everything is redrawn until suddenly everything is unbearably slow. And then it's useMemo etc. galore. I'll withhold my ju…

IMO, you shouldn't use React-like tools in performance critical UI code. Direct DOM manipulation in such cases is much better and more maintainable option. I.e., it's easier to maintain straightforward direct DOM manipulations than all the tuning around making a React-like system more performant.

I would call Svelte a React-like system that actually does do direct DOM manipulations and works great for performance-critical UI code as well as everything else.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#206

Post by JohnDeHope »

wzwy wrote: post #177
WanderPanda wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is looking like a generic iOS app that bad?! Especially here on HN where the sentiment is pro plain html etc. a generic iOS UI should be well received

I’m new to HN. Why the inclination towards plainness? Is it because of performance or look or something else?

I think a lot of hackers in general, not just on Hacker News, feel like a lot of UI concerns are just bikeshedding.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#207

Post by KerrAvon »

NonNefarious wrote: post #165
jph wrote: post #2

SwiftUI is a big opportunity that Apple's not investing enough in, IMHO. It's good tech, and the reactive approach is excellent for many typical view-based needs, but at the same time the docs are terribly lacking at how to handle any kind of edge cases. Success to me looks like steering clear of SwiftUI for now, and advocating for Apple to hire documentation editors/leaders who can 1) create SwiftUI documentation of…

We've been hearing this for years now, though. And we've seen SwiftUI takedowns on here before, a year or more ago, and even then SwiftUI wasn't exactly new. Meanwhile, my team has built an entire cross-platform desktop app in Qt with QML, which has been around for years and works refreshingly well. You're telling us that Apple, starting fresh and with several years under its belt now, still hasn't gotten its shit to…

What “word”? What “ground-up rewrite”? Do you really believe everything you read on the internet?

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#208

Post by consumer451 »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #206
wzwy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m new to HN. Why the inclination towards plainness? Is it because of performance or look or something else?

I think a lot of hackers in general, not just on Hacker News, feel like a lot of UI concerns are just bikeshedding.

What do you think might be good counter examples of this not being the case?

Maybe Instagram, Discord... I was going to say Robinhood, but the free trading might have been the real differentiator?

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#209

Post by rossmohax »

dangus wrote: post #113
ohgodplsno wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS lacks many features that have been standard on Android for years and the only reason it feels so smooth is because the UI thread has pretty much the highest QoL that anything can ever have. iOS would rather drop your network call than drop a single frame. 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 manufacture…

The copying of features isn't one-sided. Both companies have had firsts there: https://www.popsci.com/story/diy/stolen-features-android-app... When I switched from Android to iOS in 2016, I was shocked at how little was different, and I can only assume gulf has narrowed since then. A lot of features Android users just assume iOS users don't have are there: vendor-agnostic password manager integration, Safari browser…

Have a look at GrapheneOS impressive feature list, iOS has some work to do.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#210

Post by kaba0 »

consumer451 wrote: post #208
JohnDeHope wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of hackers in general, not just on Hacker News, feel like a lot of UI concerns are just bikeshedding.

What do you think might be good counter examples of this not being the case? Maybe Instagram, Discord... I was going to say Robinhood, but the free trading might have been the real differentiator?

I think both Instagram and Discord is quite bad on the UX-front on iOS. Strangely enough Microsoft’s Outlook is quite decent while it still looks a bit distinct. It is not generally true of google’s iOS apps that I assume started using Flutter and it feels from time to time (mostly not-smooth scrolling)
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