I am not going to open source the project at the moment, I have to clean things up a bit before that. I'm probably gonna do that as soon as it reaches a good first RC
I would imagine you're going to get a fraction of the users testing it that you're looking for then. I know I'm not going to put my username and password into a closed source app from a random stranger on the internet.
No, GitHub never required your code to be open-source. In the past, free accounts couldn’t create private repositories. Nowadays, they can, but those private repositories are limited.
A public repository does not need to contain open-source code, or even any code at all. I imagine the repo just contained a README, and that’s completely fine GitHub-wise — why would GitHub mandate people to have code in repos?
I do have the option to create a SwiftUI project in the last version of xcode that would run on my OS, so it should support at least some of it. The question to ask, then, is how much of the new stuff, if any, this app uses.
edit: a lot of it. I tried changing the deployment target to 10.14 and building it. Got 101 "'SomeSwiftThing' is only available in macOS 10.15 or newer" errors.
I only have apple devices and I enjoy developing apps in swift, way easier and less tedious than other systems imho. Also SwiftUI makes UI design a lot easier than standard
Well not exactly the first but I’ve experimented a lot with SwiftUI and this is entirely written with that.
UI is probably the hardest part into an application, everything else is plain old style programming with algorithms, data strictures, GET requests etc.
I would suggest to look at WWDC sessions about SwiftUI for what concerns the UI part, everything else has a very active community online that will give you a lot of resources to tackle pretty much everything.
I tried to get into it recently, and I couldn't even manage a "hello world" app. The built-in demo/skeleton app creates a text label in code, and that's it. I couldn't even figure out how to get what is now called the "design canvas" to appear; ie. to create a UI visually. I feel like the introduction to Xcode in 2021 is much worse than Visual Basic 6 was 20 years ago. :'(
There is no way to create the UI visually in SwiftUI, only programmatically. I find SwiftUI substantially easier to write than Swift or Objective-C, and feel like it actually requires less use of Xcode's functionality than either of its predecessors.
> Xcode includes intuitive design tools that make building interfaces with SwiftUI as easy as dragging and dropping. As you work in the design canvas, everything you edit is completely in sync with the code in the adjoining editor. Code is instantly visible as a preview as you type, and any change you make to that preview immediately appears in your code. Xcode recompiles your changes instantly and inserts them into a running version of your app — visible, and editable at all times.
Aha, what I was looking for was the "Library" popup, which allows drag-and-drop of new components onto the canvas. Now I understand; this latest iteration of Xcode has the code <-> canvas being bidirectional, so using the library or canvas inspector just edits your code anyway! Interesting. I'll have to run through some docs and tutorials to see if I can finally pick up macOS/iOS app development.
I’ve been diving into SwiftUI lately and it’s such a joy to use, gave me a renewed appreciation for UI design. It’s nice to see some real apps being done with it, proving it is possible to do so.
Congrats on the app!
I think the browser HN UI is so good that it’s difficult to switch to anything else even though I appreciate the effort that goes into building something like this.
As some feedback: you only get one shot at Show HN, really. Or at least you should only get one shot at it, you can work around this by submitting a different URL but that kind of thing is discouraged.
You would have been better off waiting until you were ready to show the source code, and had at least a rough sketch of the features you were going to provide. It's going to be difficult to get useful feedback at this stage in the process.
I hope you don't take this as discouragement, I like the idea of having a dedicated HN mac app, and look forward to seeing it again down the road.
I don't think it's strictly true that you only get one shot but agreed this app is too early in its development to receive meaningful feedback and the author should probably come back when it's somewhat more fleshed out - right now it's just a clickable list of direct article links that launch an external browser.
Looks like dark mode, for one. I'm also personally curious if there's an effect in breaking the "what time-wasting website should I let the browser autocomplete" habit that is so easy to cultivate (is "frequently visited" a dark pattern?)
What do you mean by past? Your past interactions, eg lack of ability to engage other users related to things you’ve commented on? “Past” posts? Something else?
