Commodity and fashion with SwiftUI

I’m only just starting to dig into the new declarative UI framework that Apple announced at WWDC this year: SwiftUI, but already there are a few patterns emerging that will be fascinating to watch in the Mac & IOS development community in the coming months.

The huge benefit of SwiftUI is, as a declarative framework, the process of creating and writing UI interfaces across Apple’s platforms should be far more consistent. I fully expect that best practices will get tried, shared, and good ideas swiftly copied – and culturally the community will glob around some common forms.

This is tensioned against what Apple (and its developers) has tended to celebrate in the past decade: independence and creative expression. UI elements and design have been following a fashion pattern, with the farthest reaching elements of that design being nearly unusable as those experiments pushed the boundaries beyond what was intuitively understood in user experiences. Sometimes the limits pushed so far as to not even be explorable.

Color, Layout, and graphics design are all clearly customizable with SwiftUI. I also expect that some of the crazier innovations (such as the now common “pull to refresh” gesture) will become significantly harder to enable from declarative structures. By its very nature, the declarative structure will make the common, well established UI elements easy and accessible, so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of early SwiftUI apps to “all look alike”. I expect the impact of “all looking alike” to drive a number of IOS dev teams a bit nuts.

The “escape hatches” to do crazy things clearly do exist – and while I haven’t reached that level of learning with SwiftUI, it does seem to follow the “make easy things simple, and hard things possible” concept of progressive disclosure.

It will be interesting to see what happens this fall when the first SwiftUI apps become available as experiments and where that takes consistency and usability on the Apple platforms.