I always make it a point to buy small apps that are well-designed, well-engineered and well-architected in order to support the developers who make them.
We need more apps like this in every category.
9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
101–110 of 405 posts
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's what MS said as well, when they were pushing C#. All Windows will be using safe code! Still waiting... Another example is Mozilla and Rust - hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there was still Netscape code somewhere in the bowels of FF/TB!
Sure, Apple cares less about backward compatibility, but still, it's unlikely Objective-C is going anywhere, under the hood.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#103> 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.
That was a particularly crazy time for Windows UI development!
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#104> In the end, building a polished, frictionless support chat was one of the best decisions that I have ever made for Paper.
Many many years ago, I used to run a web hosting company. One of the first things I did was I built one of those little chat widgets that let me chat directly with visitors on my website. This was around the year 2000 and before I had ever heard of liveperson which was somewhat new at the time. That single feature did more for my business than anything I did. Because I could talk directly with customers (and potential customers), and because I was the sole decision maker for the business, I was able to say yes to ridiculously obscure requests for features that were easy to implement but very valuable to just one specific customer. My hosting business never grew into a large company but it did support me through college and for a while afterwards.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Interesting!
So all the NS_SWIFT_UNAVAILABLE APIs are still easily bypassable in Swift?
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#106> Categories in Objective-C are a way to add new methods to any existing class, including framework classes (categories can also be used to replace methods, which is both powerful and scary ). I use them to harmonize the API. So if a method in UITextField is called text and in NSTextField it is called stringValue I can add a stringValue method to UITextField that calls text (or vice versa). > By the way, I also use c…
Keeping my fingers crossed it will not happen. :D
[deleted]
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#107> Categories in Objective-C are a way to add new methods to any existing class, including framework classes (categories can also be used to replace methods, which is both powerful and scary ). I use them to harmonize the API. So if a method in UITextField is called text and in NSTextField it is called stringValue I can add a stringValue method to UITextField that calls text (or vice versa). > By the way, I also use c…
One problem in the past was -[NSArray firstObject], which many developers used as a category method, with differing implementations. Apple added it to the Mac OS X 10.9 SDK but actually implemented the method silently in 10.6!
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agree!
It's a single form-over-function thing that I could not resist not to add. :)
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Foundation is being rewritten entirely in Swift.
That's a mult-year project in its very early stages, yet we're already almost 10 years into Swift (more than 10 years of Swift internally to Apple).
> All new code is in Swift.
False.
> All new frameworks are Swift-only.
False.
Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
#110> Swift has come a long way and my guess is Apple has either embedded it into their platforms or added some fancy tree shaking for the binary. It went ABI around Swift 5 or so. I took a huge leap of faith, in 2014, and started using Swift, exclusively. It's turned out OK. I'm not quite as positive about SwiftUI, though. I think it will work out, but it has a huge amount of catching up to do, if it is to replace UIKit…
I've released a SwiftUI app, but was a nightmarish experience. They are experimenting and changing stuff to better serve SwiftUI philosophy, like the change from Combine to Observation. There were plenty of bugs and some of them difficult to debug like previewing screens on Xcode, sometimes it keeps crashing. When it works it's marvelous. I hope they can stabilize it.