SwiftUI for complex user interfaces

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Created Jul ’20

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I'm about to embark on quite a major new software release.
It's a time-line based app (like iMovie or Final Cut Pro X) but it's not video editing. It's more like video arranging. (The app arranges video and audio clips for massive multi-screen displays, and then captures metadata from cameras and actors, while the videos are playing.). They don't play from the editor machine - it uploads them to client 'players' and simply controls and synchronises the playback of them.

It will be exclusively for macOS (so no Windows or Linux) so I don't need anything which is cross-platform.

There will be up to 100 'tracks' in the timeline, and on each track are multiple media clips (videos, animations, audio, etc) and each clip should show a thumbnail preview, and/or audio waveform.

There will also be a preview pane in the UI, where any one selected media clip can be previewed, and an asset manager, and optional panes like data visualisers etc.

So my questionn is, is SwiftUI a good choice for a complex userinterface, with a time-line style work area like this?

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Answer 1

KMT OP

Jul ’20

We're a year in, and SUI is still evolving, meaning I'm not yet comfortable using SUI & complex in the same sentence.

Quoting the 'net "More complex tasks don’t have good example code yet. Rather than just searching stack overflow for how to accomplish a task, you might have to read the Apple docs and figure out how to put together multiple pieces that have never been written about before. There just aren’t a lot of examples for how to do things yet, and there’s a lot of new terminology to learn just to be able to sanely google about what’s going on."

Point is, you might not be asking this question if your skill and mind set were up to the task. Without those, you may spend more time wrestling w/SUI than you do working towards a deliverable.

If however, your actual goal is to learn SUI, and shipping a deliverable isn't important right now, then this sounds like a perfect track.

I would move to more solid ground for now, then move that macOS video-centric application towards SUI later, as it and your skills, etc. develop, and questions like this stop popping up ;)

Good luck.

Ken

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