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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

#81

[flagged]

The author did say he experimented up and down with prices and what people would pay for. If people think they are getting more then 33 cents a day worth of productivity out of the app ... then it works for them. Does seem rather high to me as well.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#82
post #12

[flagged]

Let's put it like this: you want a nice drawer to store clothes. It has one purpose and one purpose only. You can either go to Ikea and get a 50 EUR drawer that will do the job, or you can pay 500 EUR to a local artisan for a nice cabinet with solid wood, an elegant design, a nice finish and even good wood for the back part. Literally depends on who you are, but I don't see how this is any different. And before "soft…

Is software cheap? Even a small project can a few weeks to hack things together, and if you try to price it based on your hourly salary, the cost can climb in the thousands really fast.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#83

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.

Thank you!

There's occasional spam, but the barrier of having an Apple device to spam is enough to not make it a problem.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#85
post #65
post #51

Lovely writeup. Making that webpage must have taken quite some time also? A question out of curiosity. What are your thoughts on re-writing in Swift? If it were me, I am sure my tech-fingers would itch for a rewrite, but my business hands would slap those thoughts away.

Be real: Apple is not going to rewrite MacOs/iOs in Swift. Objective-C will always be there, offering faster and more robust features. Just look at the Microsoft equivalent: yes, C# is good and all, but the hardcore Windows apps are still using (lightly-skinned) VC++ APIs - after almost 25 years since they started flogging .NET. Swift is for the new rubes, bootcamp graduates and so on.

They're literally rewriting in Swift right now. Foundation is being rewritten entirely in Swift. All new code is in Swift. All new frameworks are Swift-only. They're using Swift from low level firmware on the Secure Enclave to apps. This is already real.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One nitpick: I dislike the tiny custom scroller.

IMO customizing scrollers is almost always a disservice to users.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#90
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think even today Objective-C has some unique benefits for me. It's more low-level and more hackable. And I think some older APIs are not even available in Swift. Of course, the pressure to rewrite would grow with every year as Apple continues deprioritizing Objective-C, but that's a problem for future me. :)

Aside from inline assembly, Swift can operate at just a low level, it just requires more work, since those operations are unsafe. All of Apple's public frameworks are importable into Swift. At this point there are more frameworks unavailable in Obj-C.
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