It's been a whole year since the release of Broadcasts on iOS & macOS, with a couple dozen significant updates in the in-between adding major new features, including:
- A RadioBrowser-powered directory of thousands of stations
- Recently Played
- Handoff
- CarPlay
- CloudKit syncing
- watchOS app
- tvOS app
- Localization to nearly 30 languages
- Early UI redesign for macOS 11
In that time, too, I have launched Pastel on iOS and macOS, updated all of my Mac apps for Universal Purchase and Apple Silicon, and shipped a ground-up rewrite of Lights Off. In short, it's been a long year, for many reasons!
In July, feeling confident that Broadcasts v1.x was in a good place, I transitioned all of Broadcasts development towards the next major release, Broadcasts 2, an ambitious rewrite of the app's UI using Swift and SwiftUI.
Swift
Broadcasts Swift migration stats via GoSwifty
After WWDC 2020, I felt it was the right time to move all my development to Swift, from Objective-C. I originally made that leap of faith in 2014 and very quickly regretted it, as early Swift was an entirely different beast. Reversing course, I spent most of the following year excising Swift from my codebases, anticipating that there would come a point in time in the future when the language had settled down and most of my initial pain points were gone. I think we're there now — so, after a summer of experimentation with Swift 5 & SwiftUI, I determined to go Swift-only for future development across all of my projects. Up to now, I've felt strongly that I could use Objective-C to my competitive advantage — it did let me launch both Broadcasts and Pastel in the same year, neither small apps, and across iPhone, iPad and Mac no-less — but I started to feel like if I waited until 2021 to begin migrating my codebases it might be a little too late. I might never get that window of opportunity again, so I rewrote all of my apps simultaneously in the haze of lockdown madness and Apple-Silicon-processor-transition euphoria.
To ease the pain on this kind of migration, I decided not to touch any of Broadcasts' library or sync code in 2.0, instead focusing on the UI. That still meant a rewrite for a good 75% of the Broadcasts codebase, with little direct user benefit, as I've used the strictest warnings & analysis features for years in my ObjC development which brings it much closer to Swift in terms of reducing bugs, crashes & subtle logic failures, but it has streamlined the project massively and made it much easier to add new features and adopt new frameworks like SwiftUI.
SwiftUI
AppKit (top) vs SwiftUI (bottom) editing panel in Broadcasts
In Broadcasts on macOS, I have, up to now, used tailored AppKit panels for its various editing sheets and alerts. With the changes last year to SwiftUI & Catalyst's UIKit, I feel much more confident that I can build a richer UI, retaining the Mac-like elements & behaviors, without having to resort to using AppKit anymore. I must admit, it was rather cathartic removing a bunch of NIBs, classes, headers, and relay controllers and replacing them with a single panel made in SwiftUI.
The primary toolbar in Broadcasts also moves to SwiftUI for layout, which makes the various modes it switches to (for iPhone, iPad, and with window resizing on macOS) so much easier to organize and extend with new features. On iOS, SwiftUI also powers the new Now Playing screen and external display UI, and is sure to feature heavily in the next version of Broadcasts for Apple Watch.
I'm excited to use SwiftUI for layout in future apps — I do think that's where it excels, even if I wouldn't trust it for navigation or core app logic right now. SwiftUI is just another tool in the developer tool belt, and, even though it's very situational, it can be applied skillfully to great effect. Far from competing with UIKit, it is entirely additive to Catalyst development — a useful and fun layer on top and a great accelerator. For certain, SwiftUI means the end of Interface Builder, and I can easily recommend it as an IB replacement. I know there's a lot more integration with AppKit that I'd love to see from Catalyst, and I can't help but feel that SwiftUI will be that glue layer, abstracting developers away from hosting AppKit views & controls completely.
The story continues…
Broadcasts 2 for Mac is available now for macOS 11, and will be coming to iPhone & iPad in time. This being a developer-interest post, I haven't even talked about the new user features in Broadcasts, like the Now Playing screen, Sleep Timer, homescreen Widgets, AirPlay route picker, vastly improved free user tier, lost-connection handling, and non-intrusive errors & alerts. I hope to give some love to the watchOS & tvOS apps too, but have nothing to announce at this time. As always, you can follow along with development over at Twitter.