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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

#321

Post by crashmat »

timestretch wrote: post #299
hbn wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has a lot of niceties like this in their software. I've had so many times I thought "I wonder if I can do this?" and it just works because a designer thought of it before me. Prime example I stumbled upon recently: In Apple Music, you can press+hold an album or song to pop open an action menu. I use this a lot for adding songs to the queue. There's an item to add it next in the queue, and another to add it last…

I'm surprised to see an example from Apple Music. That app is an perfect example of design neglect too. The ability to filter your song list for a specific track is now hidden in Apple Music. To reveal the filter field, you must select the "View" menu, and "Show Filter Field". Worse each time you relaunch Music, this field is again hidden, and you have to select the menu item again.

It's much worse for apple music classical. It's great for classical music, but the way the library works with works and recordings is unintuitive and they decided to remove the ability to download (!?) and the ability to share playlists in the classical app and those as main-app only.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#322

Post by zamalek »

> Closed-sourced native UI is a fragile place compared to the predictable JavaScript runtime of the browser.

Is that really the case with Apple dev? I'm genuinely curious.

I wound up extremely tired of the continuous moving target of web dev - especially in terms of x-browser compat, and very intentionally avoided it as much as possible professionally. The likes of WinForms, WPF (the Silverlight subset is still the best UI framework that I've used), GTK, and QT were significantly less frustrating - dare I say enjoyable.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#323

Post by satvikpendem »

germandiago wrote: post #173
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.

And you are now locked down to one environment.

Indeed, Apple customers are quite a big market of course, but as an indie dev especially, there are more markets to bring your products and services to. That is why I use frameworks like Flutter which work everywhere, even if they are worse than Apple's developer platforms (and this is subjective even still). The upside is simply too great to lock myself to only one platform.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#324

Post by internetter »

papereditor wrote: post #303
pappereditorrr wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Nothing is wrong with SEO. But I expected a blog in a similar fashion as your .dev page but I was highly disappointed when all I saw where these "empty" click-bait esque posts. 2. I've seen plenty of apps doing the same trick in the App Store. But if it doesn't affect the search indexing why even bother putting up a long list of apps that could hurt your business. Nothing but respect for the work that you do and t…

1. Sorry for the disappointment! SEO articles and high-quality thought pieces can coexist on a website - they have different purposes. The /blog slug is indeed a bit misleading, but that's what I started using initially, many years ago, and it's not even advertised on the website, so people should not end up on it. My point is - there is nothing shady about SEO articles. But I will think about reorganizing the site t…

> But I will think about reorganizing the site to better separate the articles.

Please, I concur with the other people who suggested this

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#325

Post by internetter »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #296

How much do you make a year from this app

The attached video in the article says there are 367 subscribers, and there is some discrepancy (they say subs are 100$ a year but app says 50$). Apple is likely taking 15% (indie developer program), so between 15-30k

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#326

Post by pacifika »

papereditor wrote: post #73
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #63

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.

I’m not sure why but non of the images are animating for me on iPhone 15 plus

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#328

Post by airstrike »

rubymamis wrote: post #262
jwells89 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt is probably closest among cross platform frameworks, but comes with some thorns that can be difficult to ignore and contribute to that “hard to use” sentiment. The way Qt Widgets is for practical purposes usable only with C++ or Python is one such thorn, as is its use of custom types like QString. Both increase friction significantly as many devs aren’t able to use their preferred language and can’t use the langua…

You can use Rust with QML[1]. QML is actually pretty amazing. I've been building my block editor[2] view entirely in QML while the model is in C++. This separation of logic and presentation works great. And yes, there are some crashes sometimes (that I find quite easy to debug thanks to the built-in debugger), but take for example a similar app that's built with Rust and Dart[3], in my testing there were still memory…

You have no idea how valuable and helpful this comment was to me. Thank you very much!

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#329

Post by airstrike »

ogoffart wrote: post #264
jwells89 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt is probably closest among cross platform frameworks, but comes with some thorns that can be difficult to ignore and contribute to that “hard to use” sentiment. The way Qt Widgets is for practical purposes usable only with C++ or Python is one such thorn, as is its use of custom types like QString. Both increase friction significantly as many devs aren’t able to use their preferred language and can’t use the langua…

I'd like to take the opportunity to mention Slint: a new toolkit in the scene, is inspired by the spirit of Qt while aiming to address its shortcomings https://slint.dev

I've spent (what I thought was) quite a bit of time researching so many of these alternatives posted on this thread and this is the first I hear of slint, so thank you for sharing. It may be just what I was looking for

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#330

Post by airstrike »

mromanuk wrote: post #110
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #94

> 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.

You can still use Combine in Swift, but I agree Observation in general feels inferior for all but the most mundane cases.

It's like you go through a SwiftUI tutorial placing @Published and @ObservedObject everywhere, and then once you're writing the app you realize what you need is Combine except you haven't learned that yet

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