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9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

papereditor.app

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Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#71

Post by jmull »

KMnO4 wrote: post #47
Alifatisk wrote: post #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?

That experiment was done in 2015, when the Swift runtime had to be included. If you build an app now, it will link to the system runtime and be close to 100kb as well. This seems to be premature optimization. The author forced himself to learn archaic Objective C for a completely unnecessary reason, and now is stuck with that design choice despite not having any benefits.

> not having any benefits

Actually, building on stable abstraction is a pretty nice benefit when your focus is on the product.

Swift is quite nice, IMO, but has also changed quite a bit since 2015 and using it would likely have lead to a bunch of work to keep up.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#73

Post by papereditor »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #63
papereditor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I probably would have to do it at some point if Apple decides to completely deprioritize it. For now, Objective-C even has some benefits. It's more low-level and more hackable. And I think some older APIs are not even available in Swift.

Out of curiosity is that a hand crafted page? It is a nice flow with the animations and the graphic call-outs, etc. I'm personally not interested in the Obj-C code snippets but that overall layout of the page, the sidebar ToC, the minimalist design is just really stunning. Also - how did you do the visuals in the "Gnarly Bits" section that split the page/components out into verticals? That is such an amazing way to d…

It's hand-crafted with TailwindCSS, vanilla HTML, and JS. I've worked on it for 2 months part-time. I was hoping it would get people's attention, and so it did. :)

The component split is done by hand in Figma with regular screenshots and cropping. I also used a plugin for skewing.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#75

Post by ohwellhere »

mattl wrote: post #48
ohwellhere wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a hot minute since I've done work in this ecosystem, but I am not sure it is accurate to say that Storyboards do not support Auto Layout. I used to build iOS apps with Storyboards and Auto Layout a few years ago. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...

They said they do support Auto Layouts.

I can't read. :)

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#78

Post by seanw444 »

gyomu wrote: post #49
monkeynotes wrote: post #45

All the "fringes" stuff is where the magic is. The author suggests that no one notices some of the refinements, well this may be true on day one, but people discover these touches as they grow more familiar. Those subtle thoughtful additions are what makes the difference between an app I like using, and one I love using. They help me feel a couple of things: 1) A connection; I feel like I noticed something just for t…

I love many things about Procreate, but their palm rejection is terrible (ie inexistent) compared to every other drawing app which means the canvas often zooms/rotates wildly while I’m drawing (maybe cause I’m left handed?), making it super frustrating to use; they’ve ignored requests to address it with eg canvas lock for years ;_; https://folio.procreate.com/discussions/3/6/13198 https://folio.procreate.com/discussi…

> they’ve ignored requests to address it with eg canvas lock for years

Shouldn't that be pretty easy to implement, too? Just a button that prevents rotation...

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#80

Post by another2another »

Fantastic writeup (read all the way to the end!), and especially impressed the author is brave enough to include a chat support tool. I'd be worried that somebody would lean on the Z key for 20GB and constantly spam my chat.

I have a copy of IA Writer that I've somehow never used, so maybe I'll buy this to add to the pile.

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