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Comment by porcoda | Hacker News Reader

Glad I’m not alone. I’m a relatively senior developer who’s worked 30+ years on a ton of different systems, and every time I wade into the Apple ecosystem in the last 10 years or so to build a native application for macOS I feel like an idiot since it’s much harder to find what I need to know to accomplish something. I always assumed it was because I wasn’t their target demographic: I don’t do iOS apps, and the things I want to write are often not just a matter of throwing together a bunch of widgets and a data model and calling it good. I guess their terrible documentation isn’t a me problem, but an Apple problem.

Add to that the annoying use of videos: I hate finding out that something I’m interested in is buried in a WWDC video instead of written up. I don’t have time or the desire to watch videos as reference material: please stop.

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> I’m interested in is buried in a WWDC video

Or even worse, in a wwdc video that apple has tried to scrub off the face of the internet (anything older than 2017). I still don't understand why they would do this.

My understanding is that they used media they don’t have the rights to or something like that.

I have the opposite experience. After a decade of backend work, I had to write an app for Windows, macOS and iOS.

The latest SwiftUI is just the best with modern "reactive" approaches working really well. Good community and documented patterns of how things should be developed, packaged and deployed.

The closest alternative is Electron.

The native Windows development is just terrible with tens different ways and frameworks which were abandoned by Microsoft at one time or another.

For the use case of presenting JSON in a pretty way, SwiftUI is great - let’s call that the happy path. But Flutter is also great at that, and you’d only need one implementation that way.

The problems begin when you are doing less trivial or obvious things on iOS/Mac, like interacting with Bluetooth, or displaying large amounts of data in a list, or forms that scroll like your designer wants them to, or background processing, or…

Currently wading through WinRT, and all things look good compared to the WinRT experience.

Layers of false layers of false layers of false laysers ... until you get to, pointer.

HorribleRunOnNameLandOfNoEnd::ThatGoesForeverOffThePageOnEverySingleFunctionCall::WithMassiveChainsThatCompletelyOverwhelmTheirOwnIDE::AndMakeYouTrailYourVisionAcrossMassiveGulfsOfTimeAndSpace::ToFind( int* ptr )

You grab some command line example off the web that seems kind of simple and get:

ExternalDependencies[7777]:

1: _msvc_bit_utils.hpp

1000: DirectXMath.h (?? it's not a graphics app)

2000: joystickapi.h (?? same. totally confused)

3000: processtopologyapi.h (?? we're doing topology calcs?)

4000: windows.devices.smartcards.0.h (?? not a smartcard app)

5000: xpolymorphic_allocator.h

And in using the IDE for a week or so, I've already found so many bugs I don't know what to do. Functions are perpetually listed broken because of an array upfield slightly wrong. It seems compelled to format my code the absolutely worst way available at any given time. It would be better to simply turn off formatting. And ... their example broke. Inside of a bag maze I had no interest in navigating.

> The native Windows development is just terrible with tens different ways and frameworks which were abandoned by Microsoft at one time or another.

As an observer... I'd recommend you find the oldest book on making Windows apps that still works on modern Windows and use that. If Microsoft hasn't killed it by now, it's probably going to keep working for the next two decades.

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