Because it’s been around for so long, it obviously has some artifacts that you wouldn‘t see in a more modern UI framework, such as the cell paradigm which is completely missing from UIKit. The most common downside is probably also related to AppKit‘s age. Did you encounter any problems or disadvantages connected to those technologies?
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Most importantly though, using AppKit means you get a ton of behavior for free from the framework, such as accessibility support, keyboard shortcuts and text editing that looks and feels like it does everywhere else on the platform. And while it has bugs like any other piece of software, it generally really lets you do your job without too much fuss.
It has a history that spans more than 30 years, starting at NeXT in the late 1980s. The great thing about AppKit especially is that, for one, it‘s tried and tested. Tell us about the good parts: what’s great about those technologies?
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Of course there were also cross-platform technologies back then, but on the Mac those products never ended up looking and feeling like real Mac apps. So the choice in those days was relatively simple - if you wanted to build a Mac app that looked and felt at home on the Mac, you were using Objective-C and AppKit. The world in 2010 was a lot different than it is now: the iPhone SDK was still quite new, there was no sign of SwiftUI on the horizon, and we were still years away from getting a first glimpse of Swift. Why did you choose those particular technologies? Us Mac engineers at Sketch mainly use Xcode for our development work, and we use GitHub for version control and issue management. It‘s mainly written in Swift these days, but there are still plenty of Objective-C parts around. The Mac application part of Sketch is based on Apple‘s core macOS frameworks: AppKit, Foundation, Core Graphics, Metal and many others. What technologies are you using to develop it?
Personally, I joined the company in March of 2020 to work on the Mac app. Sketch is an industry-leading design platform for the Mac and the web that‘s been around since 2010 and has become the industry standard in fields such as UI design, especially for mobile applications. Tell us a little bit about your app: what does it do and when did you start working on it?