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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I remember being a junior engineer in 2015, and being asked to render a clickable link within a paragraph in an iOS app. Swift had just been released so we were still entirely on the ObjC/UIKit stack. It was an absolute nightmare. I _barely_ managed to make it work. I haven't really touched iOS since about 2016, so I assumed the new SwiftUI stuff would have this stuff built in. Obviously. Kind of insane that it wasn't.

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It's quite literally called Link

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/link

I'm not sure how much easier they can make it at this point.

When I say "this stuff" I'm not talking about a link, I'm talking about the overall markdown/text capabilities that the post is talking about. I meant that I expected more parity with what you'd encounter on the web.

You expected highly capable, generic GUI toolkits to show parity with a development environment that has specifically targetted text above all else (though with lots of other stuff and great depth too) for decades?

Even in an era of PWAs and highly reactive UIs, the web is still fundamentally a document presentation mechanism. No generic GUI toolkit fits that description (even if they can be coerced into being one).

Given how much shit the web gets from native developers, yeah kinda? They make it seem like it's light years ahead of the web, often arrogantly so.

For trees of interacting widgets, it is.

For text presentation, not so much.

Qt made this pretty easy 10 years ago

Why pay a license fee when you can make a bloated and slow electron app instead?

Both Qt and Electron are LGPL.

From their website:

"Qt comes with Dual Licensing, which includes both commercial and open source options. To build a proprietary mobile application, you need the Commercial Qt license, within which Qt for Application Development is sufficient for pure mobile and desktop app development."

exactly! paying a licence takes away valuable money that could be better served by buying the shareholders a new yacht!

NSLinkAttributeName?

My thought exactly. However, Apple’s developer documentation has never been particularly helpful, so I don’t blame very much for missing that.

I thought attributed text handled this fine since forever. Did it not?

Do not know about "forever", at the moment it works okay, I guess. But for a long long time most of the iOS apps were using this https://github.com/TTTAttributedLabel/TTTAttributedLabel to have proper support for links & other basic attributes.

I vaguely remember doing this with attributed text for iOS 4.

That said, I also had quite a lot of success on iOS 4 using HTML as the layout engine for the main screen of the app, though the place ran out of money before that went anywhere.

HTML can be really good, the blockers back then were it not being exactly the same as the Apple UI guidelines unless you put in a huge amount of extra work that nobody wanted to spend. I'm not sure when Apple's own guidelines stopped mattering exactly (iOS 7's invisible buttons necessarily had to be ignored, but there was already a decent level of custom UI before them and it was already essentially irrelevant even before Apple became extra-inconsistent with Liquid Glass), but I think we're now at the point where you only follow those guidelines if you (a) don't have your own UI team, and/or (b) want to try to aim for a shout-out from Apple.

>being asked to render a clickable link within a paragraph in an iOS app

The specific ask was already a bad idea.

the whole company was a shitshow; that was probably the least insane thing i was asked to do there.

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