9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
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9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
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Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#2> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser.
Huh, that sounds contrary to what people usually tout as a benefit of native. You always hear about framework churn and cross-platform problems when it comes to JavaScript. Maybe that’s not so true anymore?
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#3> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser. Huh, that sounds contrary to what people usually tout as a benefit of native. You always hear about framework churn and cross-platform problems when it comes to JavaScript. Maybe that’s not so true anymore?
JS, as bad as it might be is close to 100% backward compatible, your project will work forever on newer browsers, that can't be said for Apple.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#4> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser. Huh, that sounds contrary to what people usually tout as a benefit of native. You always hear about framework churn and cross-platform problems when it comes to JavaScript. Maybe that’s not so true anymore?
In this OP compared the runtime, not frameworks. In my experience the web platform is extremely stable.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#5Smoothing the caret after character insertion is unbelievably pleasant. Now every other input feels glitchy, almost like continual paper cuts.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#6> To my surprise, the Swift one had the full Swift runtime embedded into it — about 5MB, while the Objective-C one was super light — tens or maybe 100KB in total.
That's a huge difference, but I believe it's because Swift is meant to be somewhat cross-platform, right?
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#7> To my surprise, the Swift one had the full Swift runtime embedded into it — about 5MB, while the Objective-C one was super light — tens or maybe 100KB in total. That's a huge difference, but I believe it's because Swift is meant to be somewhat cross-platform, right?
No, it's because Swift was not ABI stable at the time, so it couldn't be added to the operating system.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#8> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser. Huh, that sounds contrary to what people usually tout as a benefit of native. You always hear about framework churn and cross-platform problems when it comes to JavaScript. Maybe that’s not so true anymore?
JS, as bad as it might be is close to 100% backward compatible, your project will work forever on newer browsers, that can't be said for Apple.
Also goes in the other way. We can literally only support iOS 17 because we’re using SwiftUI and Apple refuses to backport anything, whereas in JavaScript you can generally use new APIs while either gracefully failing or triggering a fallback
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#9Nice write up! Kudos to the author for being so humble about his journey - quite something achieved from my perspective.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#10> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser. Huh, that sounds contrary to what people usually tout as a benefit of native. You always hear about framework churn and cross-platform problems when it comes to JavaScript. Maybe that’s not so true anymore?
Just don't use frameworks, or use the stable ones.
I use React and it had exactly one significant major change (class components -> functions & hooks) since 10 years ago when I started out with the beta release.
Windows went through 4 different "recommended" GUI frameworks and many more major API changes during that time.