340 karma · joined May 9, 2013
On the other hand I have a personal iOS app that normally doesn't take long to approve that's been waiting two weeks.
More dangerous are communities who shun AI and treat every disclosure like a Scarlett letter. Generally the loudest opinions come from consumers (fan bois) and not creators. I think this will eventually drive new innovators away from these communities. These vocal naysayers have likely never experienced being a project manager, lead developer, and QA for an agent writing code. Instead they think a prompt magically creates software, but without wearing all these hats at once, you get something far worse than 'slop'. Call me crazy, but I think these multi-hat 'developers' using an agent and are dipping their toe into LLM development are going to raise the bar and leave us vim users in the dust.
It's used a few different ways in the app I'm looking at now. One is to hold a source of truth for my API data models. This way I have a cache of say User that, when it changes for whatever reason - maybe invalidating the cache (read logout) or changing a profile image - is handed around to all my Views that need User info with @Environment(\.user)
Same thing with my analytics. Something like a MixPanel is only going to be created once. It's a singleton. You pass it around in an @Environment.
NavigationStack was a problem pre-iOS 17 and even a bit of a jam in 17 -> 18 and was glad to drop that version. But passing around an enum of values makes deep linking intuitive, yes there's a bunch of boiler plate - setting up an enum I guess - but deep linking was never easy. If you're not doing deep linking then a NavigationPath is really simple to use but I assume that's not what you were talking about.
I used MVVM for about 6 months and ripped it out. There's no reason to use that pattern in SwiftUI. It was popularized by certain iOS evangelists and caught on with the newbies (myself included). Your reaction to MVVM and useless ceremony is exactly the response you should have to a code smell that doesn't belong and it was mine too.
2. There’s no magic here. There is poor documentation. The biggest trick — small views, think about what values are going to trigger a refresh. Avoid cascading view refreshes.
6. You might have missed a couple big iOS releases (iOS 7 was one to remember) where many of our apps fell over in UIKit. Swift was another ‘DOA’ for YEARS with the same issues you’re making here, each new version broke the old, but here we are in a day and age where it’s the standard.
Data Flow: The author claims there’s no way to know when things update. Not only does experience help here but there are profile tools that tell you when and where things are updated. This isn’t black magic. Keep Views small, be careful how you hand around data. @environment is super cool but can have a cascade effect. This was greatly improved iOS 17+ and I wouldn’t support anything older than iOS 17.
GeometryReader: Occasionally I’ll use this. It’s kind of a necessary evil when dealing with certain view complexity. It can also be a sign that you’re doing something wrong.
API Stability and performance: Apple users upgrade. There’s no reason that you should be supporting iOS 17 at this point — even iOS 18 is roughly 2%% of our user base across several apps. I’ve been using SwiftUI without major performance issues but I also don’t early optimize. I profile and fix as needed. One of the early studios I worked for wrote all our games in UIKit as prototypes, when performance tanked we’d switch to the appropriate tools (eg. OpenGL) where it was necessary — like in the core game.
I could go on but in the end just use the right tool for the job, if you’re not proficient in SwiftUI or it isn’t going to work for your cross platform project, you have a lot of other alternatives. For me though, it’s been amazing to work with. I stepped away from iOS programming for 3 - 4 years because I was burnt out using storyboards, dealing with massive view controllers, and all the boiler plate it’d take to get a view up and going in UIKit. SwiftUI roped me back in.
* Quick addition edit: Cross platform for iOS, iPad, macOS has never been good. I’ve found recent updates have made things better to the point of tolerable and it’s nothing like when we had to post-fix an ~ipad to our Nibs — There has never been a ‘glory days’ of cross platform Apple UI libraries.
So do many developers. I've lost count how many times a code review had to be rejected or cleaned up because of copy and pasted code and I'm going to admit, sometimes it's just quicker to duplicate a little code and leave a comment for 'next time'.. we've all done it.
.. like this one time I had a PR and the developer created on loooong linear method, couldn't figure out how to share between targets and copied and pasted the same bad code somewhere else. Somehow it got through and when asked why this was on production the answer was 'it worked'.
>> no time for elegance
This happens, your experience in is generally your quality out. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be elegance. I've worked at major product driven companies where elegance took a back seat to getting release out the door.
Or did I miss the attribution?
* Edit: I’m not looking for the downvotes or to stir things up. I’m simply calling out that this is a small niche community we notice these things, we’re very free with our code, and copy is a compliment, but so is attribution.
The author wasn’t so much inspired the by Brogue style, but copied it directly down to the animations and ASCII.
Worse is going to be the job listing, no native iOS developer is going to touch it. It’s possible a rn + ts developer might find it an interesting challenge and maybe even have some iOS experience. I guess it all comes down to what the job qualifications are in said listing. But is your startup going to know this when/if they need to do a backfill?
But here’s the caveat to what I said. If the rest of the team you’re working in is also using the same language and maybe has some familiarity in react native it’s probably not so bad and someone can step into your shoes if necessary. Also, if your implementation is fully transparent and this is what the startup paid for, then I’m going to say more power to you, you built them what they needed and you did it your way.
* This is coming from someone doing iOS since the store opened in 2008. I've pretty much seen ALL the bad decisions at some point. There are projects I will not take no matter what the pay is.
When it comes to general software development for customers in the everyday world (phones, computers, web). I often write once for proof, iterate as product requirements becomes clearer/refined, rewrite if necessary (code smell, initial pattern was inefficient for the final outcome).
On a large project, often I’ll touch something I wrote a year ago and realize I’ve evolved the pattern or learned something new in the language/system and I’ll do a little refactor while I’m in there. Even if it’s just code organization for readability.
https://fatbobman.com/en/posts/tips-and-considerations-for-u...
Apple’s own documentation discusses this in detail and for large data sets recommends the Lazy approach. If you’re using List you’re in for some issues.
Off the top of my head, I’d consider the approach. Is it a ScrollView? A LazyVStack? What do your view redraws look like?
Anyone working with Swift Strings back in Swift 1+2 was in for some shockingly bad performance. We adopt, we adapt, and the framework matures.
But as of iOS 15+ SwiftUI is very production ready. I’ve migrated two production applications from UIKit to SwiftUI. These have active users and are available on the App Store.
Bloated? The last migration resulted in 79k new lines of code written and 181k deletions after rewriting 80% of the application.
Photos album works out of the box. If you mean camera then there are some issues depending on your use case. Beauty of SwiftUI is we can wrap UIKit views and interop allowing it to play nicely with other frameworks.
If you’re supporting applications that target the last few iOS versions it’s time to learn the new paradigm. Do yourself a favor but most of all anyone who might inherit your codebase.
I was hit with a bad oil gasket that causes the engine to burn oil. It’s so much work to replace their solution is to replace the entire engine. My solution is to keep putting oil in it. I was told by the dealer this is common over 70k miles.
The steering controls (heat, volume, cruise) stopped working pretty early on. It was well over $1k to fix, mostly labor. Apparently the connection they use is prone to failure.
Leaves me wondering if my next car will be a Toyota. Maybe if they adopted Apple CarPlay.
That being said, batteries are still good and I’ve been pretty impressed how low the maintenance has been.