Today, a rant against SwiftUI AND Xcode:
SwiftUI is neat. Really. I’ve seen talented people on Twitter showing what it’s already possible to achieve with it. I’m using it for upcoming projects, and it actually motivates me to move to Swift from Objective-C But.
I know Swift and I’ve written apps in Swift. But to me, Objective-C (or ObjC) is far more readable and easy to learn. I love ObjC. I use Swift. That’s a pretty big difference to me. I know, that’s against Apple’s marketing around Swift. I’ve always ended up writing the core of my apps and my private frameworks in ObjC, and satellite apps in Swift.
In fact, in Alvadi Classic, the frameworks that the app is built upon are ObjC (except for Charts that is written in Swift, but it’s a 3rd Party library). The watchOS app is built with Swift. But it’s a tiny satellite app revolving around an ObjC core.
When Apple introduced SwiftUI, I saw a lot of possibilities and the opportunity to jump on the Swift bandwagon. So I followed Apple’s tutorials and finally made a new project for an upcoming app that I plan to write entirely in Swift instead of ObjC and design the UI with SwiftUI instead of Interface Builder.
But.
The combination of SwiftUI and Xcode can be very frustrating. The horrendous errors that are throw for a small typo in a SwiftUI struct is very intimidating for a somewhat-accustomed-to-Swift developer. Let alone a newcomer to the wonderful world of software development…
Since the SDKs bundled in Xcode 11 are still in beta (and the IDE itself being in beta), I hope that Apple will improve it by the time they reach the Golden Master state.