IOS on Mike Gopsill

How to Control the Status Bar in iOS Simulator

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Need to quickly change the iOS Simulator’s status bar for screenshots or testing? You can do it with the simctl command-line tool. Here’s a quick look.

The Basic Command

The core command to manipulate the status bar is:

xcrun simctl status_bar <device> override <options>

<device>: Use booted for the currently running simulator, or a specific simulator UDID (get a list with xcrun simctl list devices).
<options>: These are key-value pairs for what you want to change.

Common Status Bar Overrides

Here are some of the most common things you’ll want to do:

Searchable Folders in SwiftUI

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t met OutlineGroup in SwiftUI yet, picture Finder’s sidebar rendered in SwiftUI: click a chevron, folder children appear. I recently tried to get this working with search. I wanted folders to open and close depending on whether the contained valid results…

After much wrestling and many coffees I gave up on OutlineGroup in favour of a tiny Node model, a ExplorerStore viewmodel, and some recursion.

The result? A searchable file‑browser that behaves at least as my mental model thinks it should.

Stopping SetNSColor(CGContext, void const) Crashes in UIKit

Fri, 16 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

I recently encountered a crash on SetNSColor(CGContext*, void const*) with
[__SwiftValue CGColor]: unrecognized selector sent to instance. It took a while to find the root cause as the stack trace lacked a lot of detail. Ultimately it was a SwiftUI Color in a UIKit API that expects a UIColor (or raw CGColor).

In this case I passed a SwiftUI Color via the .foregroundColor attribute of an NSAttributedString that UIKit then rendered.

Using Context Menu with Previews in SwiftUI

Sun, 11 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

SwiftUI’s contextMenu modifier is a simple API that does a lot for us.

I wrote about building context menus in both UIKit and SwiftUI recently. I did not go into detail about support for the custom previews that landed in iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS 13. Let us fill that gap.

Recap: Context menus in SwiftUI

A context menu is equivalent of a right-click on touch devices. Using long‑press (or Control‑click on the Mac) on a view reveals a menu of options exactly where the user needs it. In pure SwiftUI we use .contextMenu to create these menus:

How to use Context Menus in UIKit

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this post we’re going to add context menus to a UIKit UITableView. The end goal is to have something that looks like this:

Why Use Context Menus?

Context menus are great for keeping things tidy while still offering useful features. They:

Keep your UI minimal
Only show options when needed
Feel natural with the iOS long-press gesture
Save you adding extra buttons all over the UI – the menu keeps them tucked out of sight until needed.

What We’re Making

We’ll show a short list of fruit. When we long-press any item we will show a context menu with three options:

How to use Context Menus in SwiftUI

Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The aim for this post to build a very simple List view. When you long-press a row you will see a classic iOS context menu. It will look a little like this:

Why Context Menus?

Context menus give users an easy way to discover secondary actions right where they’re looking. They:

Keep the primary UI clean.
Surface actions only when they’re relevant.
Feel familiar thanks to the long-press gesture we already use across iOS.

What We’ll Build

We’ll create a simple list of fruit. A long-press on any row reveals three actions: