First impressions of using SwiftUI for real

My first impressions of SwiftUI were it was a bit of a slog to get up to speed; the changes from the beta to the release version weren’t helping; sudden unfamiliarity after years of UIKit was uncomfortable; live previews were failing more often than they were working.

But after a couple of weeks it dawned on me: you’re mad to try and build a SwiftUI app like a UIKit app; which of course was what I was doing.

UIKit requires you to have a working app, to even start to see anything running. With SwiftUI you can start from a single screen that you’ve been imagining and see its preview as you build. No need to think about the app’s model, the launch behaviours, the navigation, or any of the plumbing.

Gotta break those UIKit habits; just start playing with a single view. It was much more rewarding and each proof of concept was easier to reach. Kind of like building from the inside out. You get to build the most important concepts first.