This year's WWDC has just confirmed my personal Love/Hate relationship with Apple as an independent developer. I suspect I am going to love SwiftUI. It is a fundamental change in how one develops all Apple products and moves away from the difficulties of quickly connecting User Interfaces. And I absolutely hate Apple for making my new open source frameworks (Slam, Zing & Fleet) mostly, if not wholly, obsolete. I have been working on these projects for the past year because I thought there was a need for faster development of software. A lot of time and mental effort went into their design. I had a beta version that was cross-platform (like SwiftUI), as well as having additional declarative features (just like Swift). Apple has the advantage of being able to modify the language (which I could not do), but the results are very similar. In a way, I am sort of flattered that we came up with similar approaches, just bummed out that my code will now go into the dust bin. This has happened before for me, the joys of programming bleeding edge tech, and I am sure it will happen again. There are one or two areas, missing in SwiftUI, where I think my ideas would improve development, but I will implement these improvements using the SwiftUI framework, rather than my frameworks. I will repeat, SwiftUI may be the most significant software development change for Apple, since before the release of iOS, since iOS is mostly a port of existing MacOS X design. It is as easily as important as the release of Swift language itself. So back to the books, err, the websites, I go to learn more.
