Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

100 Days of SwiftUI

hackingwithswift.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 110 posts

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#101

Post by tentacleuno »

wk_end wrote: post #61
krembanan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cross Platform UI is a myth How can you say this when many of the worlds most used apps are written in React Native? Same with Electron and desktop apps. I find it hard to believe you can be more productive writing native code when you need two entirely different codebases, compared to a single one, no matter how good of an iOS and Android developer you are.

I don't know if I was using React Native "wrong" or what, but when I tried it out I found it to be a miserable experience. There's almost no usable components "built-in"...there seems to be an expectation that you cobble your UI together using one of a variety of different third-party components or component libraries, and every single one I tried was incomplete, buggy, poorly-maintained, poorly-documented... Based o…

You were using it wrong IMO. The platform comes with a lot of built-in components (just look at the docs!) just from importing the React Native package.

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#103

Post by afavour »

wiseowise wrote: post #99
afavour wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been dabbling in this space for a long time and I’ve become convinced there will be no good cross-platform mobile UI story. The UIs are too different for there to be a one size fits all solution. (as an aside I really like Swift too and have been enjoying noodling around with it as a server language. Probably rarely a wise choice given that it isn’t their focus but there is some attention given: https://swift.or…

There’s a good cross platform mobile UI story, it’s called browser.

I believe in the superiority of the web in general, but absolutely not in UI.

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#104

Post by nicoburns »

zengid wrote: post #78
nicoburns wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add Rust to your list. The Rust UI ecosystem is still very immature, but it has a tendency to implement things very well once they are implemented and the potential is huge.

Speaking of Rust UI, do you have any favorites? I've been casually watching for a long time but haven't seen a clear winner there besides Iced or egui.

Iced is still the most capable atm, but Vizia and Freya are also worth looking at. The great thing is that the ecosystem is mostly made up of modular composable libraries, so to a large extent once one framework gains a functionality they all do.

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#106

Post by afavour »

wiseowise wrote: post #105
afavour wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in the superiority of the web in general, but absolutely not in UI.

Why?

It has an extreme lack of UI primitives. Look how seamlessly iOS native views transition to each other, the consistent navigation bar, the modal views, etc etc. There’s no equivalent of UITableView letting you render long lists efficiently.

Any equivalent of the above has to be hacked together using JS, which ties up the main thread and can never fully match the host OS.

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#107

Post by jeremy_wiebe »

no_butterscotch wrote: post #86
jeremy_wiebe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that developer experience (and often user experience) aren’t always the highest priority. For many businesses that want to ship a mobile app, cost is by far the biggest constraint. And “writing once, shipping everywhere” pushes out native development. We at Khan Academy have moved much of our app to React Native and overall it’s a great experience and much easier to maintain than two native apps. Of co…

How much of KA's web react code (I'm assuming?) can be re-used in RN land? Or vice versa, do you use RN-Web or plan to?

Currently we only share Perseus (our exercise and article npm library). We do hope to begin work to share more code at some point but it hasn’t risen up in the priority list just yet.

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#109

Post by aflukasz »

afavour wrote: post #106
wiseowise wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

It has an extreme lack of UI primitives. Look how seamlessly iOS native views transition to each other, the consistent navigation bar, the modal views, etc etc. There’s no equivalent of UITableView letting you render long lists efficiently. Any equivalent of the above has to be hacked together using JS, which ties up the main thread and can never fully match the host OS.

Exactly.

At this point, the most straightforward technical road to cross platform UI seems to be building high level UI toolkit that runs on browser runtime (ONE specific browser run time), and "platforms" slowly integrating this runtime as their native and only behavior. Note that I say "most straightforward", not "easy".

Personally, I don't see any viable *business* road for this, but happy to read some fan fiction on that.

Re: 100 Days of SwiftUI

#110

Post by Delphiki »

afavour wrote: post #12
zengid wrote: post #4

Tangent but I'm holding out from learning Swift until I see how the "Cross platform UI" wars shake out. We've got at least Kotlin, Dart, and JavaScript all battling it out (via Kotlin Multiplatform, Flutter, React Native) to be the king of UI languages across all platforms. I really like Swift though (from the little I've learned), so it's too bad it doesn't really have a cross platform UI story yet. (I could learn a…

I’ve been dabbling in this space for a long time and I’ve become convinced there will be no good cross-platform mobile UI story. The UIs are too different for there to be a one size fits all solution. (as an aside I really like Swift too and have been enjoying noodling around with it as a server language. Probably rarely a wise choice given that it isn’t their focus but there is some attention given: https://swift.or…

> Probably rarely a wise choice

I think you'd be surprised! There are some big names using it at scale[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/Te0aCoenCMg?t=710

Post reply on HN