171–180 of 405 posts
This is a beautiful blog, the same as the minimalistic app. Huge congrats. I'm seeing myself building this, as the joy it returns by using an app built by yourself. I have feelings similar to those expressed in the article using vim-motions or generally Neovim. It's so simple that even it works in a terminal. But once mastered (at least the basics), I feel like a surgeon when operating, as I edit text so fine-grained…
> 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…
When I tried using SwiftUI, the performance for scrolling through lists past a certain size was very painful. I guess there were ways to mitigate this slowness, but they were very unintuitive and did not give me confidence in the developers commitment to keeping apps snappy and responsive. The APIs for NSTableView and NSCollectionView, in contrast, were always very responsive and performant when used in the default w…
The ability to go low/no-dependencies, as mentioned in the blog post, is one of my favorite things about Apple platforms. It’s not just possible but practical to build a capable, highly polished app without bringing in anything third-party thanks to the richness and depth of AppKit/UIKit. Few frameworks can compete, with even other juggernauts like Qt coming up short in comparison.
I agree with his approach - I remember writing Objective-C back in 2015/2016. At the time, Swift had just launched but it was nowhere near ready for production. So I had to learn Objective-C/UIKit/etc. As frustrating as it could be at time, I overall have pretty fond memories of it, and I got really good at it.
I've lost the skills since then but hope that Swift has matured enough to be suitable.
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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)
> The big problem is navigation and state handling Those seem like very basic features that a UI framework needs to get right.
The ability to go low/no-dependencies, as mentioned in the blog post, is one of my favorite things about Apple platforms. It’s not just possible but practical to build a capable, highly polished app without bringing in anything third-party thanks to the richness and depth of AppKit/UIKit. Few frameworks can compete, with even other juggernauts like Qt coming up short in comparison.
And you are now locked down to one environment.
The ability to go low/no-dependencies, as mentioned in the blog post, is one of my favorite things about Apple platforms. It’s not just possible but practical to build a capable, highly polished app without bringing in anything third-party thanks to the richness and depth of AppKit/UIKit. Few frameworks can compete, with even other juggernauts like Qt coming up short in comparison.
Also, it turns out to be much faster than comparable native apps (performance benchmarks available on the website).
Ignoring popover presentations in UIKit, there’s also a new TipKit framework in iOS 17, but it’s Swift-only.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/TipKit
The author has done a great job while remaining in Obj-C. I’m really curious how long they can avoid Swift, keep the native experience, and offer new features in the platforms.
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Oh yes, sorry. This is a form-over-function detail that I added to the website to mimic the app. I did not, however, invest the time to make it expandable. I thought that people anyway don't use the scroll bar that much, and for quick navigation there is the table of contents on the left. I'll see if I can make it more accessible!
You can't (unless there's a trick I don't know) change the width of the scrollbar when hovering over it. However... you can keep the width constant and have the apparent-width of the scroll thumb be determined by transparent borders. This would give the appearance of your current 2px scrollbar, but it'd be usable, and would visually expand out to show its grabbable area on hover: html::-webkit-scrollbar { width: 8px;…
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And you are now locked down to one environment.
One man’s downside is another’s upside.
It’s not a coincidence that macOS/iOS has long had a disproportionally large quantity of high quality indieware. Capable framework + minimal headaches = polished apps that an individual or small group can sustainably support, even within less profitable niches and without VC funding.