And then there’s SwiftUI, which may be a harder concept for regular users to grasp, but it’s a huge step on Apple’s part. This is Apple’s ultimate long game—an entirely new way to design and build apps across all of Apple’s platforms, based on the Swift language (introduced five years ago as yet another part of Apple’s long game).
In the shorter term, iOS app developers will be able to reach to the Mac via Catalyst. But in the longer term, Apple is creating a new, unified development approach to all of Apple’s devices, based in Swift and SwiftUI. Viewed from this perspective, Catalyst feels more like a transitional technology than the future of Apple’s platforms.
Apple’s own SwiftUI page provides more details. This is the future of application development across all of Apple’s platforms, so if you have a vested interested in the Apple world, you’d do good to get yourself acquainted with it.
Did this remind anyone else of sun microsystem’s vision for unifying development across platforms? This whole concept is very java-esque. The more things change, the more they stay the same, haha.
Java Swing, .Net/Xamarin, UWP, Ubuntu’s Convergence/Qt, responsive Web,… yes there’s no shortage of previous attempts to provide a unifying cross-platform framework. Providing a UI that scales well across form factors has always been a serious sticking point, and I’m yet to be convinced building platform-specific UIs on top of good cross-platform libraries isn’t more effective. Nevertheless, Apple has a great UI track record (and lots of money), so if anyone can crack it…
Before working on Java, Sun was licensing the OpenStep api which is the ancestor of Cocoa… OpenStep worked very well on Windows NT too.