Earlier this week, James Dempsey asked on twitter about who else was actively trying to build macOS apps using SwiftUI. I’m super interested in SwiftUI. A year ago, it spawned my own side-project into writing my own reference docs on Combine. Originally I had a vision of writing about Combine as well as SwiftUI. Combine alone was hugely, so I stopped there with the notes, especially as SwiftUI is still massively maturing. Some pretty amazing updates came just earlier this year. While clearly not finished, likely not even close to finished, it’s now far enough along in it’s maturity that you can at least consider using it for full apps. Or parts of your app if you like – macOS, iOS, watchOS, or tvOS.
While I’m been keeping track of the framework, I’ve also been keeping track of people who are using it, writing about it, struggling with it, etc. There’s two implementations of full applications, all open source (and hence completely visible), that I’ve been following as super interesting examples of using SwiftUI: NetNewsWire and ControlRoom.
NetNewsWire
I’ve contributed a bit to NetNewsWire, only a tiny amount (and mostly around continuous integration), but I’ve been using it since the earliest days and from it’s original inception and through multiple owners to it’s current state as an open-source project that Brent Simmons is leading. The code is available online, ever evolving, at https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire. The recent work to embrace SwiftUI is on it’s main branch with a lot of the SwiftUI code under the directory multiplatform/shared. Take a deep dive and dig around – there’s some gems and interesting questions, and you can see some really fascinating examples of integrating SwiftUI and UIKit or AppKit where SwiftUI isn’t quite up to some of the tasks desired by the project.
ControlRoom
The other app I’ve been watching is ControlRoom, an app that Paul Hudson referenced in a demo capture on twitter. ControlRoom’s code is on Github at https://github.com/twostraws/ControlRoom, released earlier in SwiftUI’s lifecycle, and showing an integration not of the new SwiftUI app architecture pieces, but more of “classic” macOS AppKit integration. Like NetNewsWire, I found a number of really great gems within the code, often having “light-bulb” moments when I understood how the app accomplished some of its goals.
Others…
There are easily other apps out there, that I’m unaware of – but not too many folks are openly sharing their development like the two projects above. I did find a list of open-source IOS apps on GitHub that includes a subset listing SwiftUI, that might be interesting.
I have a few of my own experiments, but nothing as polished and effective as these two, and I don’t think I solve any problems in novel ways that they haven’t. In a bit of test and benchmarking code, I was creating SwiftUI interfaces across macOS, iOS, and tvOS – which turns out to be a right pain in the butt, even for the simplest displays.
I hope, but don’t expect, more apps to become available – or to be more visible down the road. Having the open sharing of how they solved problems is invaluable to me for learning, and even more so for sharing. Apple has their sample code, well – some of it anyway – but seeing folks outside of Apple use the framework “in the wild” really shows it’s working (or where it isn’t).
Rhonabwy 