All in on SwiftUI

A lot has changed in iOS land since I was last involved. In 2014 Apple released an entirely new general-purpose programming language called Swift that’s meant to replace Objective-C for app development. Swift syntax is almost Pythonic, so it’s way easier to read than Objective-C (which has a lot of syntax quirks). Unlike Python, Swift is a strongly-typed language, and it’s compiled, which means it’s fast.

As someone who’s been working with Python exclusively in my professional life for the last few years, there’s a lot about Swift that excites me.

At WWDC 2019, Apple released a new UI framework for writing apps called SwiftUI. I don’t know much about SwiftUI other than it uses a declarative syntax to describe user interfaces, so no more Interface Builder or Storyboards I guess. I also know the latest versions of Xcode include some fancy new design tools for rendering live and interactive previews of SwiftUI code without having to run apps in the Simulator, which should speed up development, so I’m excited about that.

As a new iOS developer, SwiftUI seems like the fastest way to get from zero to an app in the App Store, so I’m not going to spend any time re-learning Objective-C or UIKit. If I wanted to be a professional iOS developer, then I don’t think I’d be able to take these shortcuts because legacy iOS codebases are still largely dependent on those older technologies. But it’s just me right now, and I’m starting from scratch, so I have the luxury of picking and choosing the technologies I use.

SwiftUI seems like the future, so I’m going to try to build my first app using nothing but SwiftUI. Out with the old, in with the new!