Marc EdwardsSwiftUI will be six years old this June. How do you feel about it? Is it likely to survive another couple of decades, or do we need another reboot and new approach to UI?
Steve Troughton-Smith@marcedwards đŽ
@stroughtonsmith đ Is there something around that you feel is the correct approach? I didnât enjoy Auto Layout at all.
@marcedwards I never used autolayout, but I don't think layout is the most critical part of a UI framework at all â 98% of the layouts in my apps are done by hand in -layoutSubviews et al. UIKit is the most-correct thing out there (it was âAppKit 2.0â after all), and I wish Apple had built an 'AppKit 3.0' to bridge all the platforms. Autolayout and late-era Interface Builder poisoned the well and drove people to yearn for something like SwiftUI, but both are unnecessary and completely optional
Russell Ivanovic@stroughtonsmith @marcedwards not 100% sure I agree with layoutSubviews being enough but definitely agree SwiftUI has evolved into a kinda worse framework than UIKit. I think it wins at âtake whatâs in my head and put it on screen quicklyâ but then fails hard at a lot of things after that. Ironically, for an Apple framework, the biggest being polish.
@rustyshelf @marcedwards SwiftUI is just fancy layoutSubviews. There are any number of layout engines you can put on top of it, declarative, Interface Builder or otherwise. Loren Brichter had a block-based layout engine for Tweetie that might have taken off in an alternate timeline