MacKuba

In the last few weeks I’ve been trying to catch up on SwiftUI - watching WWDC videos, reading tutorials. Not the new stuff that was announced 2 months ago though - but the things that people have been using for the past year.

Last June, like everyone else I immediately started playing with SwiftUI like a kid with a new box of Legos. In the first month I managed to build a sample Mac app for switching dark mode in apps. However, after that I got busy with some other things, and never really got back to SwiftUI until recently, so by the time the “version 2” was announced at the online-only WWDC, I’ve already forgotten most of it. So in order to not get this all mixed up, I decided to first remember everything about the existing version, before I look at the new stuff.

Back then, when I was watching all the videos and doing the tutorial, I was taking a lot of notes about all the components, modifiers and APIs you can use, every single detail I noticed on a slide. However, I was surprised to see how many of those things I wrote down don’t work anymore. After the first version that most people have played with and that the videos are based on, there were apparently a lot of changes in subsequent betas (especially in betas 3 to 5). Classes and modifiers changing names, initializers taking different parameters, some things redesigned completely.

I was going through some saved links and open tabs from June recently while finishing the WWDC collection post. I found a lot of interesting quotes about SwiftUI, Catalyst and the future of Apple platform development, and I decided to steal the idea from @mjtsai and put them together in one place. It might be interesting to look at this 5 or 10 years from now…

As I’m writing these words, it’s the last day of November and the temperature has just dropped to close to 0°C here in Poland. But let’s move back to a better time for a moment, to the first days of June - the long days of warm sunny weather, inviting you to spend some time outside… and the huge pile of new stuff that Apple had just dropped on us on the WWDC keynote day, inviting you to try to frantically read and watch everything at once, and don’t leave the computer until you’ve read it all.

For the past 4 years I’ve been trying to cope with this crazy period by collecting notes from the WWDC talks, release notes, saving tweets, links to blog posts and so on, and organizing it all in a single ordered blog post. Writing things down this way is how I learn best, it helps me put together all loose pieces of information into a single picture, and gives me the peace of mind that I haven’t missed or forgotten anything important.

I usually finish this by July, but this year was different - first I got really hooked on SwiftUI and spent some time doing some experiments with it, and then I was busy working on and releasing my iOS content blocker app and doing some travelling. It didn’t help that the sheer amount of new APIs added this year was simply overwhelming.

So I finally got back to this in November, and I’m posting the list here on the half-anniversary of the 2019 keynote (yes, it’s really been 6 months already!) - hopefully it will still be of use to you.

I spent a large part of last week learning and playing with SwiftUI. So far it’s been pretty frustrating at times since I kind of feel like I forgot everything I knew, but I’m also very excited about where this will lead us. I’ve summed up my first impressions in the “Thoughts on SwiftUI” post last week.

At the moment most of the available examples show how to use SwiftUI in iOS apps, but I wanted to see how it would work on the Mac (in AppKit), since it’s kind of closer to my heart (hint: look at the domain name :).

And I had an idea: last year, when I was playing with the new Dark Mode in macOS Mojave I had a plan to build a simple app that would let you override the appearance in specific apps using the NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance setting. I started working on it, but I got stuck while figuring out the complex NSTableView API which I had no experience with, and I gave up.

So, how about I give it another try now, but with SwiftUI? I don’t really need such app myself (I only use light mode), and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other similar apps last year, but this seems like a perfect way to try out SwiftUI on the Mac - and to see if it will be easier to get the table view to work…

Update 15.08.2020: I’ve updated all code to work with the latest (stable) version of SwiftUI, adapting it to all the changes that were made to the API in last year’s later betas.

Like everyone, I was shocked by Apple’s surprise reveal of SwiftUI at WWDC last week. We’ve heard rumors of some kind of declarative, multi-platform framework coming sometime in the future, but I don’t think anyone expected we’d see it so soon. This seems like a huge change, a beginning of a completely new chapter for app developers on Apple platforms. I’ve watched most of the session videos about SwiftUI and I’m incredibly excited and eager to start using it in practice.

Here are some first impressions and thoughts about SwiftUI after reading about it and playing with it for a few days: