inessential by Brent Simmons

WWDC 2019 First Words, Which I May End Up Eating Later, but Hopefully Not

SwiftUI is the future of app-making for our community.

UIKit for Mac (Catalyst) is a lateral move. I’m sure this will be super useful for a lot of developers, though not for me personally (since I don’t have an iOS app to move to the Mac).

But AppKit and UIKit both look like old news compared to SwiftUI and the Combine framework.

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I’m not going to start using SwiftUI right away in NetNewsWire for Mac — NetNewsWire 5.0 is too close to shipping. We’re fixing bugs, and that’s it.

But we do plan to use it in NetNewsWire for iOS, since it’s not as far along as the Mac version. Obviously I’ll have more to say about SwiftUI as we learn more about it.

Could we eventually get to that place where the Mac and iOS version share UI code via SwiftUI? It looks promising! I would love that.

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The future of app-making looks more and more like web development. Declarative. Semantic. Dynamic — adapting to context (interaction styles, accessibility settings, screen size, etc.). Runtime-editable.

SwiftUI and Combine can also be seen as an answer to Electron and React Native. The right answer for Apple, I think.

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I’m way behind on videos. I’ve seen just a little bit so far. So much to learn! This was a big WWDC.