Native all the way, until you need text

kept by eddie may 18

A veteran macOS developer finds that native Apple frameworks fail to support rich Markdown chat UIs, making Electron and WebKit more practical despite developer criticism.

SwiftUI After 7 Years: A Story of Mediocrity: Will it ever stop feeling like a beta? — Yakov Manshin
SwiftUI after seven years remains unstable, performs poorly, and lacks API stability, forcing workarounds and reflecting Apple’s lowered quality standards.
also on AppKit, SwiftUI, #user-experience, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)
A 2023 Hacker News discussion laments the decline of idiomatic design in web and software UIs, citing inconsistent patterns, poor usability, and loss of platform conventions.
also on AppKit, #user-experience, #software-engineering
Meet WebKit for SwiftUI - WWDC25 - Videos - Apple Developer
Apple introduces a SwiftUI-native WebKit API to simplify embedding and controlling web content across Apple platforms.
also on SwiftUI, WebKit, #user-experience, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
Native all the way, until you need text
Web views like Electron outperform native text frameworks (TextKit 2) for complex Markdown rendering, despite size overhead, due to resource investment and cross-platform convenience.
also on Electron, WebKit, #user-experience, #software-engineering, #developer-tools
I vibe coded my dream macOS presentation app
Simon Willison describes creating a custom macOS presentation app using AI-assisted vibe coding in Swift, which sequences URLs as slides and includes a phone-based remote control via Tailscale.
also on SwiftUI, #macos, #user-experience, #developer-tools