I Had Been Worried About the Mac
I spent the month or so before WWDC like you — suffering through a pandemic, outraged by violent racism, worried about democracy. Heartsick and appalled, mad and sad.
Nothing has changed since WWDC, either. Except for one thing. A small thing in comparison, but important to me — I had been very worried that Apple would, as part of the ARM transition, lock down macOS so that only Mac App Store apps would be permitted.
That didn’t happen. And Apple employees explained that it’s not going to happen — and, given that it didn’t happen this time, given that they had this chance, I believe them.
I understand adding security features to the Mac. But to take away our freedom to create whatever Mac apps we want, and distribute them without Apple’s, or anyone’s, seal of approval, would be to take the heart out of my career.
But that’s not what happened! I feel great about this. I’m going to stop worrying about the Mac.
The New Way of Making Apps
I’m excited about the new features in SwiftUI this year. This reminds me of the early 2000s when I switched from writing Mac Toolbox apps to Cocoa apps. It was a whole new way of writing apps, and it was so much better.
I jumped right on it, back then — and I feel no less enthusiastic for this new new thing than I did for Cocoa almost 20 years ago.
Apple has essentially said, I believe, that the way we’ve been making apps is all legacy. AppKit and UIKit both. SwiftUI is the future.
NetNewsWire and SwiftUI
We re-jiggered the NetNewsWire roadmap somewhat.
- Mac/iOS 5.0.x: bug fix releases
- Mac 5.1: Feedly, feature parity with iOS
- Mac/iOS 5.5: iCloud sync, other integrations and features
- Mac/iOS 6.0: SwiftUI, features tbd
The thing to call out here is NetNewsWire 6.0. We’re already at work building a SwiftUI app where Mac and iOS share as much UI code as possible.
The work is going very quickly: I’m amazed. If you want to follow along, or even help, take a look at the swiftui branch.
I’m super-psyched for this. If it means Mac and iOS can share most of their code, and we can add features more quickly (because SwiftUI makes for so much faster development), then we can ship more and better versions of NetNewsWire more often. I want that!