iOS Newsletter
Hi folks,
This week the Swift Server Working Group announced the second version of their Swift extension for Visual Studio Code. This issue of the newsletter also features more UI/UX stuff than usual and there’s a link to a neat library to use for input form validation.
Enjoy the selection!
Swift
Updating the Visual Studio Code extension for Swift
VSCode, being the editor that many developers know and love, already has a pretty good extension for developing Swift packages. This week the maintainers announced its deprecation, but worry not - a new, second version of the package is now available and you don’t even have to opt-in - the old extension triggers the install of the new one automatically for you. The only action you may take is to remove the old, now deprecated extension. Read the article to discover more on the reasons for this change.
UI/UX
Contact Provider Extension
New in iOS 18, this framework allows our apps to create business contacts on the user’s device. Apple claims that it’s a more flexible solution:
“Instead of adding contacts directly with the
Contactsframework, your app provides read-only contact items that it can update, and which the person using your app can easily enable, disable, add, or remove. This enables people to organize the contacts they use in your app separately from their personal contacts.”source: ContactProvider
Accessibility in SwiftUI explained for UIKit developers
Recently we’ve been doing some explorations around SwiftUI’s accessibility modifiers. Having previous experience in wiring accessibility modifiers for UIKit apps we have found this article a helpful guide to fill in the knowledge gaps.
Mastering Forms in SwiftUI: Creating and Styling
Working with forms can be tricky, especially when you deal with providing support for multiple platforms. This article walks us through the styles we can apply to a form and what the effect of that is between iOS and macOS.
Build a macOS menu bar utility in SwiftUI
We’ve linked articles about tweaking certain aspects of macOS menu bar applications in the past, but we never did it for an article that guides us through building such apps from scratch. Notice taken, here’s a great one from Natalia Panferova.
Building the inverted scroll of a messaging app
The inverted scroll list is a design pattern, commonly used in messaging apps. We all know it, the newest message is at the bottom of the list while older messages can be accessed by scrolling up. Here’s an article (and a video) on a way to handle this with SwiftUI.
How to open and dismiss windows in visionOS
Sometimes we just have to deal with the basics. The good part is that you can use the same approach with macOS and iOS. Bear in mind, the article does not mention something that’s in Apple’s documentation:
“To enable an iPadOS or visionOS app to simultaneously display multiple scenes — including ImmersiveSpace scenes in visionOS — add the UIApplicationSupportsMultipleScenes key with a value of true in the UIApplicationSceneManifest dictionary of your app’s Information Property List.”
source: Presenting windows and spaces
Utils
Formidable
Formidable is a neat framework built around a protocol that’s meant to provide built-in functionality for validating, resetting and checking the validity of form fields.