SwiftUI on macOS after a week

Last weeked I started reworking my oldest app, Tomato One, in SwiftUI.

What I’m excited about:

• It’s truly rapid prototyping (I’m not working with a DB yet)
• Making layouts is dead simple - knowing Flexbox helps a lot
• Customizing UIs with your own design is very easy
• Sharing simple views between iOS and macOS! I can build my “circle progress view” and easily share it between platforms.
• You can share even more complex views between platforms. But I’m generally against Catalyst approach, I think you should design from scratch for both platforms, and then share what you can (This approach is very easy in SwiftUI too)

Limitations I found:

• I couldn’t create a multi-line TextField. I left it as one-line, gave up.
• I couldn’t get my TextField to focus automatically. There is a Stack Overflow thread about this, and I copied the solution from there. But it’s basically falling back to native NSTextField.
• Couldn’t bind “Return” and “Escape” keys to Buttons. Ended up falling back to native NSButton (StackOverflow thread)

I’m going to keep working on this. It’s pretty amazing. I think I can easily ship this simple app in just a few days.