The NeXT Era Ends, and the Swift Era Begins ⇥ inessential.com
Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT.
It’s early. It has bugs. It’s not nearly complete. Sure. But it’s also how we’re going to write apps in the future.
I know a lot of developers who have been working with Apple’s products for decades.
The overwhelming consensus is that we’re seeing something that will change our lives for decades to come.
1976 -> 1984 -> 1996 -> 2008 -> 2019
If SwiftUI were the only thing at WWDC this year, it would have been a gigantic year. It only got about six minutes of stage time during the WWDC keynote; I encourage you to check out Session 204 and Session 216. SwiftUI fits the way my brain works in a way that I’ve never felt with anything other than, like, HTML.
It is impossible to overstate how important the NeXT acquisition and subsequent era was for Apple. But, now, we’re in a new generation, and I could not be more excited to see what the next twenty years is going to look like as a result of this week’s announcements.