281–290 of 405 posts
That was an amazing read, thanks for sharing all those details. Partway through I was amazed to find a code snippet that I need for my iOS PDF editor: your map of language to system fallback font! I had figured out part of it but hadn't done the whole "type in every language and see what I get" step yet.
This post is gold! Not only I love the app the post is so well written and well presented. The author care for details is crazy nice
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> I often wonder what Obj-C would look like today if Apple had put the time and effort into it instead of Swift. It would largely look like Swift, since the goals of Swift (and most modern languages), safety and expressiveness, are fundamentally incompatible with C languages. There's really no point to basing a language on Obj-C if you're not keeping 100% compatibility, so they didn't.
There are a bunch of design decisions in Swift that make it more C++ with the corresponding binary bloat + other issues than reference counted Java/Smalltalk with a C FFI that Obj-C is. You could've had Obj-C without the C for example, ADTs (enums), strong nullability enforcement and a nicer syntax while reusing most of the Obj-C core and retaining the compile speed, rock solid / fast debugging, function calls as dat…
Safe system programming is one of the key design goals from Swift.
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It does happen though - Qt tries very hard to do that. I don't know about literally everything, but the majority of platform-specific features/optimizations can be exposed through Qt with enough work. And what is the result? Everyone complains that Qt is too hard to use, and so it has utterly lost the cross-platform war to Electron, and meanwhile the devs who want the platform-native functionality (like the OP of the…
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…
What happened with using the best tool for the job?
So what if C++ and Python are the only bindings.
I'd been thinking of getting into Apple platform dev, but there really seems to be this strong contradiction in people saying to go full bore Swift/SwiftUI but reading this and as well following the Swiftcord devs' discord, there's a lot of problems with Swift/SwiftUI as a replacement for Obj-C/UIKit/AppKit. There also seems to be more and better documentation/examples for the Obj-C APIs than Swift; yes Obj-C is old,…
Nice app but your marketing make me not want to use the app. 1. The blog is flooded with SEO oriented posts https://papereditor.app/blog This vs That, Top this, Top that 2. In the App Store a whole bunch of other text editors are mentioned in the app description text in order to be included in the results when people search for other text editors. I'ts just shady and unnecessary if you trully believe in your app.
1. What's wrong with SEO? People discover the app from Google. Some of them even become paid customers. If people discover and purchase what they need - what's the harm?
2. That does not affect the App Store search results. If it would have - everyone would be doing it. App Store allows a lot of text in the description, so I thought I would fill it with something useful. I've also ordered the names from shorter ones to longer ones so it looks like a mountain. Aesthetic details everywhere. :)
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> Your point about Foundation was meaningless and the others just nits. Do you have an actual point to make? My point, as always, is the truth. You said two false things, which you subsequently admitted were hyperbole. Truth is valuable in itself, and more important than "points", i.e., arguments or motives. If I were to make a point, though, it's that Objective-C still has a very long life ahead of it, and its compl…
You're not going to be able to hire many people with Objective-C experience nowadays. Engineers with 7 years of experience just writing iOS apps will very likely will have only used Swift in their work experience. I work with 2 of them now.
By the way, we could be hired, for the right compensation. Nonetheless, companies almost never try to recruit me, but they still whine about how "hard" it is to find ObjC developers. They're not even looking.
Besides, experienced engineers can learn a new programming language. Do you think that every engineer Apple hired before 2014 had Objective-C experience?
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.