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SwiftUI After 7 Years

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Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#23
post #14

I'm sure many will disagree, but I have doubts that pure declarative-reactive is the "right" shape for an all-purpose native UI framework. In my experience, Kotlin+Compose shares many of the same warts… its main redeeming quality is that it's better than Android Framework (most of the time), which is low bar to clear. These frameworks have a number of good ideas but they don't necessarily combine in a way that transc…

I think open source is the right move here. The great thing about Flutter is you get the declarative UI to build a lot of standard screens easily but you can always drop down to lower levels, inspect the standard components, mix and match with your custom implementation. You can mix UKit and SwiftUI but there’s way more friction due to the closed nature of the SDK.

Perhaps. Certainly source visibility makes life easier as a dev who has to live with these frameworks on a daily basis. That said, I think frameworks should strive to have a wide and deep enough set of widgets that in most cases, devs won't need to resort to custom implementations to do what they need to.

It also doesn't fix problems inherent to declarative UI, like readability breaking down easily and certain things that would be a cinch in an imperative framework being extremely awkward to implement.

Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define right, it’s hard to replicate the native UI especially Liquid Glass on iOS because it’s rendering everything using its own rendering engine, making it hard to feel right on iOS. I have also seen a lot of companies move away from flutter to either native or React Native.

Well we all love Liquid Glass. Most loved UX update in iPhone and macOS history. Massive dealbreaker for an app not to look like Liquid Glass. I definitely choose apps based on whether they look like proper Liquid Glass applications instead of the developer taking shortcuts and focusing on working features instead.

I despise Liquid Glass too but for most users there’s a broad feeling of “it fits” vs doesn’t. And apps with Liquid Glass fit today’s iOS.

Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#25
SwiftUI it is the type of framework that makes the easy things easier to accomplish but the harder things harder.

It is a newbie trap. It is great at producing simple apps, or things that don't require intense scrolling, or anything with heavy animations and precise layouts, but when you do something smooth, it is not it. It feels more of a React Native competitor, than a true UIKit replacement.

Also, almost everything that Apple has re-wrote with SwiftUI, came out worse as before (Settings, Spotlight, etc), and that doesn't help.

With AI coding... SwiftUI lost its edge/advantage (easy to layout screens), as now you code less of that directly, and might as well just go fo the framework that allows the most flexibility and gives you the best results for your users.

Apple really needs to either double down on it, and make it such that it has everything that UIKit has (match both features and performance), or just turn it into another optional framework, just as Interface Builder (.xib files) back in the day of Objective-C.

Right now it heavily promotes it as a first class citizen, meanwhile the features are not even parity with UIKit. It is so misleading to newcomers to the platform.

Ps. The other upsetting thing about SwiftUI, is that it has hurt the Swift language as well, as the team has had to introduce all kinds of hacks, or obscure features to the language in order to make it work, which made even the Swift language experience worse and more complicated than it should have been.

Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#26
post #3

The problem with complex systems is that you can be dead long before you realize you're dead. Things can continue to seem "pretty good" for a long time just from the inertia of past good decisions and built-up infrastructure. You see some fraying or cracks but everything looks fundamentally sound, until it isn't. Apple's inability to deploy a new UI framework that's better than the previous one is troubling. This is…

I think the problem with SwiftUI in a way was (or is) that Cocoa was so good. And, at least IMHO, it didn't need replacing, just improving.

But I feel like Apple wanted to appeal to young web devs and tried to offer something more similar to what these are used to.

Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#28

A similar story to WPF.

WPF was stamped out by lack of dogfooding = inability to inspire confidence, and then Microsoft spazzing out with that clusterfuck that was the Windows 8 "Metro" bullshit.

Back when I wanted WPF to succeed, Microsoft was barely using it in any of their own apps.

Apple has used SwiftUI in their OS more than MS/Windows did, and there's quite a few apps on the App Store that -seem- to be made with SwiftUI.

Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#29

skills issue

I joked, but reading the post is even more clear - man this poor dude.

He is brute forcing his way through life and broadcasting it on YouTube.

Dunno man, Xogot is made up of almost half a million lines of code. Of those 727 files use SwiftUI, and 65 use UIKit, 119 use AppKit (I did not count the overlap, so they are not mutually exclusive).

Using GeometryReader makes it clear he is living in the past and the fact that he uses printChanges in this year without mentioning the dedicated SwiftUI instrument show a lack of curiosity on the space.

Re: SwiftUI After 7 Years

#30

skills issue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Let me rephrase, he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

In my professional medical opinion, he is at high risk of being replaced by a year old low-end Chinese open source LLM.

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