Gregory's ServerConsumer features are great but I'm really, really hoping for the gap between SwiftUI and UIKit to get narrower this year. It really is the future of the platform but it sucks that you have to dive below the surface and introspect away some silly behavior that isn't exposed to you by default. #WWDC24
 11 comments
 @grishka There's lots I take issue with in SwiftUI, but none of that intersects with that post https://twitter.com/harshil/status/1220957638101323778  Harshil, as someone who hates declarative approach to building UIs in general, this doesn't help. All this implicit behavior is still a lot to keep in mind at any given moment compared to the explicit nature of UIKit/AppKit. @grishka If you compare SwiftUI just to AppKit or UIKit, sure, I can see your point. But it's whole deal is it needs to be compared to both. Smart defaults things like spacing, appearance, etc. is table stakes for a cross platform technology @harshil @grishka I think some of the defaults are quite reasonable, I just wish it weren't treated as magic. `Text(“Hello”).padding()` applies system-determined mystery padding. And you can't just query how much padding was applied. The default stack spacing for a stack containing two shapes is different than stack containing two text labels. I just wish I had access to that so I can make adjustments rather than either forgoing the smart defaults entirely or doing geometry reading nonsense @samhenrigold @grishka Agreed, I want there to be more info, and more customisation! I was mad about one of these just yesterday too: https://mastodon.social/@harshil/112585977671011003 @samhenrigold @harshil @grishka Some of this spacing information is available inside the Layout protocol but I agree it's still not convenient for most cases. I don't think there's any way to get the default padding amount. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swiftui/viewspacing @grishka Ehh, I disagree there. Heck the iPad invalidates the whole argument by itself. Touch, trackpads, pencils for input, and windows as small as an iPhone SE and as large as a Mac with an external display. Do you want to develop for it with 4 separate frameworks? Harshil, the iPad doesn't invalidate it, it's basically just a large iPhone. The touchscreen is the default mode of interaction for 99% of how people use iPads. UIKit, Apple's touch-focused framework, is its native UI framework (that SwiftUI is built on top of). Apple's continued insistence on blurring the lines between UIKit (touch) and AppKit (keyboard + mouse/trackpad) really rubs me the wrong way. Steve Jobs would've never approved of any of that. @grishka If you're gonna invoke a man who’s been dead for a decade to argue against a product decision that has been in place for half of the iPad's existence, I'm not sure what we're doing here |
And all this "smart" stuff, it needs to be gone completely if SwiftUI is ever to be taken seriously