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9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

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131–140 of 405 posts

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#131

The fact that this supports the Touch Bar alone is _Huge_. Would it be possible to have a basic mode where one makes a one-time payment and has the option to hid all nagging about "Pro" features?

You can pay for the lifetime license, and it will do exactly that.

This is a great writeup.

Enjoyed even the transparency on pricing thinking, but one price that doesn't seem to have been experimented with is allowing a one time purchase that is not an in-app purchase.

In-app purchases make your app unavailable to company employees where the company manages the Apple device using MDM and purchases software using e.g. Apple Business Manager or the older volume purchasing. The $99 option should also exist as a standalone retail version so a company can buy the app for employees.

For small app makers: you might be surprised that a company-managed Mac with a company managed AppleID cannot use in-app purchases. Apple has no way for a company to do IAP for an employee, and in fact the employee cannot do it themselves either. For such users, you must either (a) allow retail app purchase, or (b) have an out-of-band subscription purchase and management, like Microsoft M365 or Adobe Creative Suite.

Whether you do it out of band or as a one time retail purchase, if you do track logins, you should support the simple "Login with" or "Continue with" buttons for Microsoft to hit the 85% of small businesses with identities on that platform, but also Apple and Google. These buttons are easier to add than devs might think. You don't need "SSO" to let most companies log in with company IDs.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#134

> 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…

SwiftUI is pretty good, I've been using to build an app. The big problem is navigation and state handling, it's not intuitive (although I never used AppKit or UIKit so I can't say if it's better or worse)

Yeah, you really need to combine SwiftUI with a dedicated architecture like PointFree's Swift Composable Architecture. It solves your state and navigation problems while adding dependency and testing solutions as well.

Apple's stubborn and bizarrely proud insistence on not providing the full solution here is very annoying.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#135
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.

> Swift is for the new rubes, bootcamp graduates and so on.

That was a bit rude and unnecessary.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#136

> 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.…

Why didn't you offer a customer support number?

I imagine because the web chat was asynchronous. They didn't necessarily have to drop everything at that moment to answer the call.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#138
post #120

I'd been thinking of getting into Apple platform dev, but there really seems to be this strong contradiction in people saying to go full bore Swift/SwiftUI but reading this and as well following the Swiftcord devs' discord, there's a lot of problems with Swift/SwiftUI as a replacement for Obj-C/UIKit/AppKit. There also seems to be more and better documentation/examples for the Obj-C APIs than Swift; yes Obj-C is old,…

I'm in a similar position. Can you not use UIKit in Swift or do you have to use SwiftUI?

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#139

> 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.…

[deleted]

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#140
post #123
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). It has already shipped, replacing parts of Foundation in the 2023 OS versions. It continues to grow, and it's a rewrite, so it certainly proves your assertion wrong. My other points were a bit hyperbolic. Feel free the replace "all" with "the vast majority of". Apple o…

> It continues to grow, and it's a rewrite, so it certainly proves your assertion wrong. Which assertion was wrong? I was paraphrasing from the project page itself: "It is in its early stages with many features still to be implemented." https://github.com/apple/swift-foundation

> Which assertion was wrong?

Your original assertion that Apple wasn't rewriting anything.

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