Ben BoeckerJan 13
Joachim

I just noticed something when I got another #Apple developer email: I don’t trust Apple anymore to teach me how to „build great apps“.

1/4 of the email is about Liquid Glass. In the *best* case they are going to teach me how to make the best out of a fundamentally bad idea. But that‘s already a huge uphill battle, because while doing so all the presenters will have to pretend that it‘s a great idea.

Another 1/4 is about Apple‘s design resources. But we all know how the HIG degraded over the years. And the design resources eg. in the form of Figma files are quite disconnected from what the UI frameworks are doing. And it’s also a bunch of Liquid Glass.

Another 1/4 is about Foundation Models. I get that it’s all the hype. But I *don‘t care*. You are selling this *way* too hard. How about you tell me about Processor Trace? (Ok, I‘m *very* biased here, but it’s a very cool technology)

And the last 1/4 is „Build great apps with #SwiftUI“, which is *exactly* what I‘d want to learn about. Except, over the last years I lost trust that this is possible with SwiftUI. And if it was, why haven‘t you taught us in the last 5 years how to do it? Why should I believe this is more than toy examples this time?

So I completely lost trust that I get anything out of Apple‘s content. 😔

Jan 13 at 6:22pmWeb
Show threadJoachimJan 13

And the usual disclaimer: I am completely convinced that this is a systemic problem, not due to the individual people (in this cases especially in Developer Publications) doing a bad job. They are doing a great job given the circumstances within Apple.

But if you don’t even have one full time author for each of your frameworks (not even the big ones like SwiftUI), how is this supposed to work? All the people I met there care deeply about producing great documentation and educational material.

One of the most impressive (well, also depressing) things I learned while at Apple is that the DevPubs authors team is basically the same size now as it was *before the introduction of the iPhone*. So since then Apple has added 5 new platforms and, I don’t know, 50 or so whole new frameworks?

The people who work at DevPubs are constantly under time pressure, overworked and forced to cut corners. They pick and choose their battles to do sufficiently good work, but that also means there are a lot of battles they don‘t fight (-> missing documentation) and there is rarely room to go the extra mile.

Show threaddasdomJan 16
@cocoafrog My trust started to fade when Apple told me over and over again that Storyboards are a good tool for iOS development while not using them themselves. That's a very long time ago.
Today I'm just grumpy and very disappointed. If I could switch profession more easily, I would switch to Linux.
Show threadJochen ZilskeJan 16
@dasdom @cocoafrog >Today I'm just grumpy and very disappointed.
Welcome to the club 😞
Show threadJoachimJan 16

@dasdom fwiw, I used at least XIBs while I was at Apple, I can’t recall whether I used storyboards. And I always liked storyboards…

Which makes this especially weird for me, because for a lot of stuff where people used to say „stupid Apple tech, this sucks“ I was like „no, actually, I think this is pretty cool“. But it‘s been quite some time since I felt that way.

Show threadDer TeilweiseJan 19

@cocoafrog @dasdom Same. Storyboards (and Auto Layout) are great technologies.

With limits but most of the time, they were all I needed (and simple to use). Even if you reach the limits, it is easy to find a (good) solution.

When Cocoa started, NIBs reminded me a lot of RSC-files I knew from GEM. I think it is a great thing to have a dedicated UI editor instead of writing UIs in code (or that *thing* they came up with as WYSIWYG editor for SwiftUI).