Arghhh. Another #SwiftUI regression in 16.4: NavigationSplitView won’t animate the first push of the detail column if the content column goes from List, to no List. Again, this worked just fine in prior releases! https://gist.github.com/phillipcaudell/a125708c3075abcabe9940427c57d1a3 (FB12175649)
Here's the exact same code running on iOS 16.2. It works just fine.
And I’m sorry if I sound like a twat, but the SwiftUI team HAVE to get a grip on this. I cannot tell you how many hours I waste wondering "Wait, is that something I broke?!”
I'm being gaslit by a UI framework!
Bugs happen, I get it, I write buggy software too. But my god, I have never in my 14 years of writing apps for iOS have the ground move beneath me as much as it has with #SwiftUI. A couple of issues every now and then I can forgive, but it's not. It's every update, something has broken or changed.
It may be a beautifully expressive framework, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't work reliably, all the time, every time.
Something is deeply and systemically wrong with it.
Fundamentally I think SwiftUI is a mistake. It is leading to years of effort spent to just get to achieve the performance and stability that UIKit already had. I think we will look back at these as lost years. Instead of new features or improving stability, wasted years chasing the new hotness.
I don't think that 'declarative' UI layout is as clean a win as its proponents do. Furthermore, I believe we could have achieved many of the same improvements by continuing to improve UIKit
@phill I think UIKit could span across platforms as well (unless there is something about the AR headset that precludes UIKit). On the Mac Catalyst has made tremendous progress and I can only imagine how much better it would be if they weren't also trying to rebuild the Mac UI on top of SwiftUI at the same time.
Edit: I also think part of the rational is not wanting to be seen as falling behind. Declarative UI is seen as 'modern' even though it is as old as AppKit