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Why I quit using SwiftUI

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Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#221

Post by NonNefarious »

origin_path wrote: post #200
NonNefarious wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be kidding. There's no excuse for Android's incompetent architecture, which orphans millions of devices with every release because it apparently lacks a competent hardware-abstraction layer and driver model. You can install creaky old Windows on millions of devices with disparate hardware configurations on the day of its release, but Android users must wait weeks, months, or forever for their telcos to dribb…

That's out of date. They added a very competent HAL and driver model yonks ago: https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/hal-types The big lift here was scrapping the Linux driver model which was at the root of most of the pain.

So now everyone can update their phones on the day of a new Android release?

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#222

Post by NonNefarious »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #180
NonNefarious wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be kidding. There's no excuse for Android's incompetent architecture, which orphans millions of devices with every release because it apparently lacks a competent hardware-abstraction layer and driver model. You can install creaky old Windows on millions of devices with disparate hardware configurations on the day of its release, but Android users must wait weeks, months, or forever for their telcos to dribb…

Welcome to the wonderful world of ARM and driver blobs. Half of the waiting time is waiting for Qualcomm to release a blob (and that's if they even want to), the other half is including it in your build, and eventually making your fork's changes if you want to do so. For every single SoC in your lineup. Then testing if they can support the new requirements of Android. Apple would have the same problem if iOS was open…

Thanks for the info. Why can't the driver be abstracted enough to allow a new OS install as long as the ABI of the driver doesn't change? Major Windows versions installed over the same drivers for years. I've never written a hardware driver, so I'm left to guess or speculate.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#223

Post by kevingadd »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #204
int_19h wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My intuition is that there are probably a bunch of O(NNN) complexity algorithms in typesetting for things like ligatures, and that's where the time goes... but I haven't written a shaping engine.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#224

Post by NonNefarious »

pjmlp wrote: post #191
NonNefarious wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Remember that their "competition" at the time the iPhone came out was utter shit, and Android (although a far cry from those days) is still pretty much shit.

Symbian was quite alright from user point of view, not so much from Symbian C++ developer experience though. Some of its features are yet to appear on iOS.

I remember its existence but never used it. It was also not popular in the USA. Motorola dominated, and if you looked at their offerings and their syncing software it was incredible how utterly incompetent it was. For example, their contacts didn't have addresses... I mean, WTF? And the syncing software (to Outlook, for example) just straight-up didn't work. I had a Motorola phone with 32MB of memory, and it couldn't hold the data my 8MB Handspring Visor could.

When the iPhone came out, that was the dominant landscape: PDAs and horribly incompetent phones. Internet browsing meant WAP (a clumsy attempt to dumb Web pages down enough to show on tiny, all-text phone screens) or a Blackberry. Blackberry rested on its laurels and a shitty, shitty browser until dead.

There are plenty of things that Apple remains bafflingly ignorant of, or just petulantly refuses to fix on its mobile devices. Great example: The iPhone, after 15 years, STILL doesn't notify you of missed calls. That's right: You don't even have the OPTION to get audible alerts of missed calls, but meanwhile you can get up to 10 alerts of missed TEXTS. That is simply stupid.

Then came the Apple Pencil... and no support for it in iOS. Every app developer had to implement handwriting recognition independently. WTF? Why didn't Apple simply allocate a square area in the on-screen iPad keyboard to accept written characters, which Palm OS nailed in the '90s?

Annnyway... I looked up Symbian because I work in Qt a lot now, and it was originally from Nokia. I knew it had been developed for phones, but could not imagine why. That's because I didn't ever interact with Symbian or see it in the wild and know it was from Nokia. So thanks for the note. I think Qt is pretty cool, and my team just made a good desktop app with it. I'm curious why the C++ Symbian experience wasn't good.

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#225

Post by kevingadd »

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…

I've been doing complex UI with a few different IMGUI libraries for years now and they can all lay out and rasterize complex scenes in under 2ms, even when written in C# instead of performance-tuned C++. Modern hardware is just plain fast, in particular drop shadows and transparency are effectively free if you're drawing them using the GPU. (I say 'effectively' because if you opt out of transparency and antialiasing, you can do front-to-back rendering to skip drawing stuff entirely... but I don't know of many cases where people do that since it's not that much faster.)

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#226

Post by worik »

saagarjha wrote: post #151
worik wrote: post #40

> I profiled the whole thing and discovered several things Well done After two years with Xcode/Swift/SwiftUI I never succeeded in getting anything useful out of the profiler.

I assume you mean Instruments? What have you tried doing? Do you have past experience with how to profile and optimize applications?

> What have you tried doing?

Following the instructions from "blogs", official videos, and what official documentation exists

> Do you have past experience with how to profile and optimize applications?

Yes. About three decades

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#227

Post by btreesOfSpring »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #72

Ugh. I haven't really coded things since I was a kid and since I have an iPad/iPhone/iMac and wanted to learn how to code again and potentially use it as a side hustle or some sort of future money making opportunity, I decided to learn swift/swiftUI and i'm currently taking an online course, but when I read through hacker news, all I see is articles bashing it constantly.

Here is a 30 minute podcast episode titled, "Different, But Not Worse," on SwiftUI vs UIKit.[0] This thoughtful take is a whole lot less adversarial towards adopting SwiftUI than what you tend to read on this forum.

[0] https://www.relay.fm/radar/247

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#228

Post by hota_mazi »

NonNefarious wrote: post #220
hota_mazi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you want icons to be able to overlap each other, or be different distances from each other, or what? I'm trying to figure out what exactly you're trying to accomplish. What would be the benefit of totally arbitrary, down-to-the-pixel placement ability?

No, not talking about overlapping.

Just talking about being able to grab an icon and position it anywhere I want on the screen (possibly snapped to a grid).

Right now, icons have to be aligned in rows anchored in the top left corner, so that whenever you insert a new one, all the ones after that get pushed right or down, messing up your entire layout.

We've had this ability on desktops since Windows 3 thirty years ago, and Android has had it since day one. As does macOS. Why not iOS?

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#229

Post by pjmlp »

NonNefarious wrote: post #224
pjmlp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian was quite alright from user point of view, not so much from Symbian C++ developer experience though. Some of its features are yet to appear on iOS.

I remember its existence but never used it. It was also not popular in the USA. Motorola dominated, and if you looked at their offerings and their syncing software it was incredible how utterly incompetent it was. For example, their contacts didn't have addresses... I mean, WTF? And the syncing software (to Outlook, for example) just straight-up didn't work. I had a Motorola phone with 32MB of memory, and it couldn't…

Symbian wasn't originally from Nokia, rather from Psion, it was born as EPOC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPOC_(operating_system)

Symbian C++ had a couple of issues, namely several restrictions of accomodating C++ for a microkernel, before the days of C++98, and organically growing from there.

So there were several idioms and restrictions on how the language could be used, and the toolchain went through several iterations, MS-DOS batch files, Perl scripts, Metrowerks based compiler, eventually replaced by an Eclipse based IDE (after a false start), Carbide.

Qt came later into the picture as Symbian was being modernized, and after a POSIX compatibility layer (PIPS) was added into the platform.

You had the security rules that iOS "invented", C++, Java and Python toolchains, being able to run http server on the phone, 3D support for C++ and Java applications.

But Symbian C++ was a bit of a pain (see link below), it was being modernized via PIPS and Qt (as mentioned), but then Elop came to Nokia, the famous burning platforms memo came out, and everyone went away.

Nokia development culture was pretty much anti-MS, so most went elsewere, instead of bothering with Windows Phone 7.

http://symbian.tomuta.ro/GUID-C3206E31-251C-4AFC-90C2-04B38C...

Re: Why I quit using SwiftUI

#230

Post by int_19h »

dangus wrote: post #215
int_19h wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it's the little things that matter. The single most used app on all my Android phones I've ever had is Kindle. And one feature that I absolutely demand from any phone is that I can flip pages with volume buttons - when reading for long periods of time, it is much more convenient than swiping with your thumb. On Android, pretty much all the reader apps can do it. But, so far as I know, this is outright impos…

Personally, I don't think the OS should ever allow an app to hijack the physical volume buttons or other hardware buttons on a phone. That seems like an avenue for abuse. (Tip: you can tap the screen on the right side to go to the next page.)

Personally, I think that my phone should be convenient for me to use.

I'm well aware of different ways to swipe pages. The reason why the hardware volume buttons are so convenient for reading is because you just put your thumb on the volume/page down button, and you no longer have to move it at all - only press down slightly every now and then. It's much more ergonomic for long-term reading than having to raise the thumb every time, even to tap.

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