Hi all, I’m glad that I recently found this forum. It’s a breath of fresh air.
I would have killed for the tutorials that you are suggesting. I recently had to create iOS and Android versions of one of my Xojo web apps. The first few days on each of Xcode and Android Studio were spent staring at the screen trying to make sense of anything. Some initial hand-holding via a tutorial would have avoided the frustration and blind-panic (due to a looming deadline) that I experienced.
Having said that, having chosen SwiftUI instead of the older UIKit does simplify things. And it is elegant. I often have to pick my jaw from off of the ground when I realise what it can do with just a few lines of code.
As an aside, I did initially try Xamarin, lured by the appeal of cross-platform development, but it really seems to have too many moving parts for me to comprehend; I had trouble just trying to get downloaded example projects to compile.
Anyway, for iOS or Android development, I now wouldn’t even think about using Xojo. The amount of time wasted trying to overcome it’s limitations are better spent working with the native tools.
My next goal is to find a good web app development platform where I don’t have to sacrifice chickens to the dev gods in the hope of getting a native data grid or decent listbox.
Looks like I’ll be in MigraineLand a bit longer than I anticipated, but I did have a few short intervals of lucidity when I was able to do a little bit of programming. And think about these tutorials some more.
I’ve been reading up more about the pros and cons of Catalyst and SwiftUI, mostly to see if they’re ready for use in released software. The consensus seems to be that SwiftUI is mostly ready, minus a few controls and some functionality compared to UIKit or AppKit controls. However, companies are already releasing software that uses SwiftUI, including Apple. At least one developer was thankful that they did not have to learn as much UIKit programming to get an app coded.
Catalyst, on the other hand, is more difficult to use. While the initial creation of an app that will run on both iPadOS and macOS is simple, getting the macOS version to behave more like a native app is the difficult part.
So here’s my current thinking:
Do the tutorial with SwiftUI for macOS, since more respondents seem to be interested in desktop programming. While SwiftUI is not 100% mature, it is the way of the future, like it or not, and I must admit that it’s simplified my development of UI’s.
Repeat the tutorial with SwiftUI plus Catalyst. Rather than do everything over again with added conditionally-compiled UIKit code, see if Catalyst can do the job anyway (since Catalyst coding is similar to UIKit programming). Why do it this way? We’ll, most of us used Xojo because we wanted cross-platform capabilities easily. Catalyst (and SwiftUI) is Apple’s way to have at least cross-device capabilities, so I thought I’d try to adhere to that philosophy. I may regret this later, but maybe I’ll save somebody else the trouble I run into. This would allow programmers to have one code base for both macOS and iOS. (And I may need to drop down to AppKit and UIKit for some features).
I’m going to work on converting an educational program of mine to SwiftUI for a little while to get myself up to speed with the latest SwiftUI and Swift 5 developments. After that, I’ll be ready to start working on tutorials.
One question for now: Would you prefer covering Swift and SwiftUI at the Big Sur stage, or should I cover Swift 5.4 and the latest SwiftUI additions in Monterrey?
As someone who’s recently decided to learn Swift and SwiftUI, I welcome more tutorials. For me personally, because I’m starting again, I’m going all in on SwiftUI and then falling back to AppKit if needed. However I would expect those with existing apps are probably more AppKit first and then maybe SwiftUI.
