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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

#191

Post by jwells89 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #184
germandiago wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are now locked down to one environment.

The insistence that every application/framework must be cross-platform, or its worthless, is so bizarre to me. What is even the point of having multiple operating systems if they can't have distinct features to gain competitive advantage by attracting application developers? If operating systems can't differentiate, we might as well all use Windows. Cross-platform applications have their place, but sometimes I like h…

This could be at least partially solved if cross platform frameworks filled in feature gaps between platforms, making their feature set a union of features on all supported operating systems, but this rarely happens. Instead they typically take a least common denominator approach, limiting apps written with them to only the most common basic features.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#193

Post by jimbokun »

saagarjha wrote: post #168
jimbokun wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you already know what will happen I don't know, what will happen?

One of the implementations will get used. If they differ this is likely to cause at least one caller to be very upset.

So..."undefined behavior"?

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#194

Post by hannes0 »

papereditor wrote: post #132
fbn79 wrote: post #124

The web page scrollbar is unusable

Sorry, I'll try to make it more accessible. It expands in the app as you hover over it. Probably needs a similar thing for the website. Or I just need to give up and revert it to the standard one. :)

> Or I just need to give up and revert it to the standard one. :)

Yes please.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#195

Post by pcammeraat »

jwells89 wrote: post #170

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.

This is also my favourite thing about the Apple platform. My apps usually do not have any dependencies and when they have they are often my own. It keeps it simple.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#196

Post by sandyarmstrong »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #162
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, exactly. Swift was specifically designed to replace Objective-C and C++ throughout Apple codebases (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQc9-seU-5k ). C# is a totally different story.

> C# is a totally different story. Interesting. Can you share more details?

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft, though I wasn't there during the early days of .NET or Windows Longhorn.

C# was created as a Java competitor. Although it had great C interoperability, the underlying .NET Framework was still a VM-based runtime with a garbage collector and all the disadvantages that brings. You can probably find various articles (https://longhorn.ms/the-reset/ is one) discussing attempts to adopt C#/.NET code for Windows Longhorn, which ultimately had to be walked back completely. .NET wasn't purpose-built for writing OS components or working deep inside existing Windows code.

Apple learned from this and other examples. The Swift team actively works with teams at Apple deep in native code to make sure they can handle their use cases without performance penalties, and with minimal ergonomic issues.

The difference is really about what the stated goals of the language were/are.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#197

Post by ninepoints »

jwells89 wrote: post #170

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 don't really understand this take. Appkit/Uikit _is_ the dependency.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#198

Post by leecommamichael »

I tried to build a zero-dependency editor of the same ilk and found it an insurmountable task. I garnered an immense gratitude for modern font-rendering, though! As someone that loves Swift, I think sticking with ObjC for this project was a great move. The default level of abstraction in Swift lends itself nicely to writing apps, but begins to feel like a bit of a different language at a sufficiently low-level (raw pointers, byte-arrays.) C is as low-friction as it gets for these things (though cuts like a knife in return.)

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#199

Post by brantonb »

This post was great, so I added the RSS feed to my reader and I almost instantly removed it. I always knew those "7 Best Writing Apps for iPhone (2024)" posts were only there for SEO, but seeing a post from 2021 with that title is frustrating. This post appears to be the only non-SEO-related post in the feed.

Not trying to take anything away from the author: the app and this post look great. But consider doing more writing like this and breaking them out into a dedicated, non-SEO feed. I'd subscribe to that in a heartbeat.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#200

Post by throwaway66201 »

internetter wrote: post #8
realusername wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JS, as bad as it might be is close to 100% backward compatible, your project will work forever on newer browsers, that can't be said for Apple.

Also goes in the other way. We can literally only support iOS 17 because we’re using SwiftUI and Apple refuses to backport anything, whereas in JavaScript you can generally use new APIs while either gracefully failing or triggering a fallback

That's because of the dynamic nature of JavaScript, you could do that in Swift too but that'd be a lot of dynamic dispatch for a static language...
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