[flohofwoe]

> It is of no surprise to me these Apple or Apple-like systems tend to be better overall

This might have been true in the past, but it's been getting worse over the last decade.

For instance: The new parts in macOS that are written in Swift seem to be mostly inferior to the parts they replaced (see for instance the new settings window written in SwiftUI, which UX wise is a joke compared to the old one, even though the old settings windows wasn't all that great either - case in point: try adding two DNS servers, searching for 'DNS server' only allows adding one item, then the DNS server panel closes and cannot be opened again without repeating the entire search, no idea how this mess made it through QA).

If Swift is so much better than ObjC, then we should start seeing improvements as users, but that doesn't seem to happen, instead things are getting worse in new OS versions. Why is that?

[JimDabell]

> The new parts in macOS that are written in Swift seem to be mostly inferior to the parts they replaced (see for instance the new settings windows written in SwiftUI, which UX wise is a joke compared to the old one

Swift is a programming language. SwiftUI is a UI framework. The programming language doesn’t dictate UX. The new Settings application doesn’t have worse UX because of its programming language.

> If Swift is so much better than ObjC, then we should start seeing improvements as users, but that doesn't seem to happen, instead things are getting worse in new OS versions. Why is that?

Because Apple are institutionally incapable of writing software at a sustainable pace and things gradually get worse and worse until somebody high up enough at Apple gets fed up and halts development to catch up with all the quality issues. This isn’t anything new to Swift; they took two years off from feature development to release Snow Leopard with “zero new features” because things had gotten too bad, which happened years before Swift. They are just far enough along in the current cycle that these problems are mounting up again.

[lapcat]

> they took two years off from feature development to release Snow Leopard with “zero new features” because things had gotten too bad

This is not an accurate characterization of Snow Leopard. See "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard

There were many significant changes to the underlying technologies of Snow Leopard. Moreover, Snow Leopard was not, despite the common misconception, a "bug fix release". Mac OS X 10.6.0 was vastly buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8.

[flohofwoe]

I was also (somewhat indirectly) responding to the claim in the parent.

> The tradeoff is that the app runs faster, looks better, works better.

I haven't noticed any of that so far in new macOS versions, and it is indeed not something where the programming language should matter at all.

[incrudible]

> Swift is a programming language. SwiftUI is a UI framework. The programming language doesn’t dictate UX. The new Settings application doesn’t have worse UX because of its programming language.

Swift the language strongly informed SwiftUI, which in turn strongly informed the applications written in it. The path of least resistance defines the most likely implementation. If I have to go the extra mile to do something, I probably will not, so worse UX (by some metric) is a direct consequence of that constraint.

[fnfjfk]

There’s not really anything wrong with the SwiftUI API. The implementation is just terrible, especially on macOS.

Jetpack Compose is a similar API on Android, except the implementation is good, so apps using it are good.

[jb1991]

And the vice-versa... features were added to Swift the language to make certain SwiftUI syntax possible.

[newaccount74]

I really hope that the new version of the settings app causes enough backlash that Apple starts fixing SwiftUI on the Mac...

[deergomoo]

The weirdest thing about System Settings is that SwiftUI already supports much more Mac-like idioms. They deliberately chose to use the odd-looking iOS-style switches, bizarre label alignment, and weird unique controls. While also keeping the annoying limitations of the old System Preferences app, such as not being able to resize the window.

[amluto]

> no idea how this mess made it through QA

I assume that Apple does not have traditional QA that tries to break flows that aren’t the new hotness. The amount of random UX breakage of boring old OS feature is quite large. Or maybe Apple doesn’t have a team empowered to fix the bugs?

To be somewhat fair to Apple, at least they try to keep settings unified. Windows is an utter mess.

[mcfedr]

That setting window.. whilst I don't really think swift UI has anything to do with.. it's just so awful, lifted right out of ios, where it is also just awful. As an android user, I don't understand how people put up with that app

[galad87]

The issue has got nothing to do with programming languages or UI toolkits, it's just that before there were more people with more attention to details, or now the management is so broken that there is no QA and no time to fix things.

[flohofwoe]

A good operating system UI framework should enforce the operating system's UX standards though and make it hard to create an UI which doesn't conform to the rules.

But yeah, in the end, software quality needs to be tackled on the organizational level.

[mpweiher]

Really?

Just at the moment that Swift and, later, SwiftUI get introduced, and entirely coincidentally, management breaks?

[galad87]

It's been a gradual process, looks at the Music app, how it has continuously got worse and buggier over the year, even without Swift and SwiftUI. You can't blame SwiftUI for that.

[mpweiher]

I see the whole thing a bit more holistically. Swift and SwiftUI are both symptoms of the more general malaise, and then contribute back to it.

We had this in hardware, with machines getting worse and worse and Apple getting more and more arrogant about how perfect they were. In hardware, they had their "Come to Jesus" moment, got rid of Jonathan Ive (who had done great things for Apple, but seemed to be getting high on his own fumes), pragmatically fixed what was wrong and did the ARM transition.

With software, they are still high on their own fumes. The software is getting worse and worse at every level, and they keep telling us and apparently themselves how much better it is getting all the time. Completely delusional.