Steve Troughton-SmithHaven't seen it explicitly called out, but if you wanna write a full-featured visionOS app with UIKit & Objective-C, it all still works natively and takes full advantage of the system. You need to use a few lines of Swift/SwiftUI if you want to present ornaments (floating toolbars), or if you want to do anything 3D like view transforms or integrating 3D content. And if you want to make a volumetric or immersive (VR) app, you need to move to the SwiftUI app lifecycle. But ObjC codebases are a go
Brian Gerfort🇺🇦
@stroughtonsmith Do you see any good reasons as to why we can’t present ornaments from ObjC natively?
@2ndNatureDev no. There is no reason. They just didn’t expose the UIOrnament class to UIKit
@stroughtonsmith I just got a reply to my Feedback request to add Obj-C support for ornaments 😲 (simply pointing out I should use Swift ~ “it's just one file!”). Am I right in assuming the UIOrnament class is actually the closer-to-the-metal class that Swift is just using?
@2ndNatureDev there are a bunch of private UIKit classes for ornaments, yeah, not sure specifically on the naming
Dan Smith@stroughtonsmith While technical reasons probably mean it will work at launch, don’t assume that it will. Us old Mac heads remember when Apple shipped 64-bit Carbon libraries in the beta builds, then removed them shortly before launch. https://daringfireball.net/2008/04/64000_question h/t @gruber
@smitty825 @gruber difference is most of the OS is written with it, and it's essential to providing compatibility with existing iOS apps. This isn't going away any time soon, especially as it's made the jump to yet another OS
Rishi Ó@stroughtonsmith I’m curious if SwiftUI was explicitly designed for VisionOS considering both projects may have been brewing around the same time.
@rishio I don’t believe so. But I do believe it was used to speed up development on the system apps as they coalesced in the run up to announcement. Much of the core system is ObjC/++, and UIKit which powers the UI is still nearly all ObjC. SwiftUI was designed for the Watch, and co-opted for other platforms — which is why there is such a drop-off in quality as you build for Apple’s more complex OSes