alt Hacker NewsThis is very interesting, I haven’t touched macOS development for quite a while but it’s good to know that libraries are still being written for both AppKit and SwiftUI on macOS.
I do feel that this library would benefit from an explanation on why this was needed. AFAIR AppKit already provides a native tabbing API where you can “just” (that “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting) implement a few delegate methods and you get tabbing behavior for free, especially on document-based apps. (Sorry, I do not remember the specifics, it might have been a tad more difficult)
I’m not updated on the SwiftUI equivalent, but I would imagine that a similar API would exist much alike API for multiple windows or multiple documents.
I think everyone would benefit from a “why” explanation (which I definitely think would exist, since I’ve used too many AppKit APIs in pain), and also some screenshots for a demo app (so that we can expect how it would look and how much the look and feel would deviate from the native counterparts).
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The website already has a demonstration of what this does that native tabs don’t do and how they look.
Native tabs work at the window level.
I've tried the native tab support several times, and my impression is that it's good for very little.
It may be OK for certain types of document-oriented apps, but there's a reason most apps (Chrome, iTerm, even Safari uses its own native tabs, I believe) don't use it. It's underbaked and awkward to fit into a model where your "tab data model" doesn't neatly fit the document data model that the framework wants.
I recently made an app where I wanted tabs, and I just ended up abandoning tab support for this reason, and adding a todo item to use an off-the-shelf tab UI library in the future.