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SwiftUI in 2022

mjtsai.com

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Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#51

Post by Willamin »

pcr910303 wrote: post #35

IMO SwiftUI feels limited b.c. it breaks itself away from the UIKit world: React succeeded because it is the DOM with all of raw HTML & CSS, a thin abstraction with official escape hatches. Mixing imperative and declarative code is natural and more abstractions can be built. Instead, SwiftUI adopted a whole new set of primitives that doesn’t mix. Accessing the underlying UIView is discouraged, and wrapping up UIKit i…

There are official escape hatches in SwiftUI to let you leverage UIKit. As someone actively working on a slow migration from UIKit to SwiftUI (where possible), it doesn't feel discouraging to wrap a UIKit view to use it in SwiftUI if necessary.

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#53

Post by kitsunesoba »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #44

I'm really looking forward to what comes of it, but I have chosen to do my current major project in UIKit. A couple of reasons: 1) The documentation for SwiftUI, when I started (about two years ago) was awful . I was shocked at how bad it was. I believe that it has since improved. 2) I knew of no major apps (even Apple ones) that had been done with it. I already knew that UIKit was up to the task, and held my nose, w…

I’ve been dabbling in SwiftUI in an existing UIKit app from time to time for a while now and have similar feelings. Even if you get past the lack of docs, SwiftUI is missing just enough bits and pieces to make it a pain. I can usually get things about 90% to where they’re supposed to be, and then I rewrite it in UIKit because that’s the only way to get the fine details right without convoluted hackery. Lack of backwards compatibility doesn’t help here — several times something I’ve needed has only been available for iOS 14/15+.

I think it has massive potential regardless, but yes it’s going to need some time to fully bake (much as UIKit did).

It’s too bad that Cocoa Bindings never found their way from AppKit into UIKit. I understand their exclusion was likely due to CPU power limitations early on, but that hasn’t been a problem for many years at this point.

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#54

Post by lapcat »

PStamatiou wrote: post #47

You could write an opposite article featuring people using SwiftUI that have never touched UIKit or iOS code before and it would be nothing but glowing praise. That's kinda like my story. Covid started and I wanted to learn something new so I started with Swift/SwiftUI. 2 years later I've been doing tons of crazy custom stuff in my portfolio tracker app https://stocketa.com (not launched yet) - I kept a thread with m…

> You could write an opposite article featuring people using SwiftUI that have never touched UIKit or iOS code before and it would be nothing but glowing praise.

How can one properly evaluate it with no point of comparison?

If you've never tasted chocolate, then vanilla might seem like the greatest flavor ever.

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#56

Post by vimy »

adamnemecek wrote: post #27
vimy wrote: post #17

Things were easier when it was just Objective-C and UIKit / AppKit. Swift killed my joy of making iOS apps.

How is Objective-C easier than Swift.

Objective-C has an unusual syntax but is easy to master. Swift has an easy syntax but is hard to master.

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#57

Post by apozem »

As a solo, hobbyist iOS & macOS dev, I like SwiftUI. It's much easier to learn than all of UIKit and AppKit. Feels like React.

That said, I find myself dipping down into AppKit and UIKit quite often. Any kind of complex views or UI interactions outside the happy path, just grab that UIViewRepresentable.

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#58

Post by PStamatiou »

lapcat wrote: post #54
PStamatiou wrote: post #47

You could write an opposite article featuring people using SwiftUI that have never touched UIKit or iOS code before and it would be nothing but glowing praise. That's kinda like my story. Covid started and I wanted to learn something new so I started with Swift/SwiftUI. 2 years later I've been doing tons of crazy custom stuff in my portfolio tracker app https://stocketa.com (not launched yet) - I kept a thread with m…

> You could write an opposite article featuring people using SwiftUI that have never touched UIKit or iOS code before and it would be nothing but glowing praise. How can one properly evaluate it with no point of comparison? If you've never tasted chocolate, then vanilla might seem like the greatest flavor ever.

The point of comparison is that it has given people the ability to develop their own iOS apps from scratch, when previously they could not as UIKit was too daunting and the tools were not as advanced (live preview with swiftui/etc).

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#59

Post by konschubert »

gh123man wrote: post #5

SwiftUI has been a game changer for me as a solo dev. Sure - you have to make tradeoffs like backwards compatibility, and some strange things are missing/don't work. But - it's been a force multiplier. You can break apart complex views into components by copy/pasting its body into a new `View` struct. It's so much simpler than ripping apart a storyboard into a XIB or fighting with layout constraints. The simplicity l…

Another solo dev, and I can second your sentiment.

I would like to add that I found SwiftUI to be extremely robust against developer mistakes. Things either work, or they give error messages. It's rare that a view is subtly broken.

Re: SwiftUI in 2022

#60

Post by lapcat »

dagmx wrote: post #49

I'm confused by this post. Is it just a random smattering of Twitter sentiment collected into one place?

Yes. It's more or less a "link blog" with some commentary and always has been.
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