UIKit

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: ...

UIAppearance is an underappreciated gem in UIKit’s toolbox. It provides an elegant way to style UI elements globally across your app, thereby keeping your codebase DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and maintainable. In this post, we’ll dive into UIAppearance and learn how to harness its power to style our iOS apps effectively. What is UIAppearance? UIAppearance is a protocol in UIKit that allows you to customise the appearance of all instances of a class. You can set global styles for user interface elements, which will be applied to all instances of that class. ...

Let’s learn how to navigate a UIPageViewController using a UISegmentedControl in iOS. The UIPageViewController provides a way to display pages of content, where each page is managed by its own view controller. The UISegmentedControl displays segments and allows users to switch between them. We’ll begin by setting up the UISegmentedControl and UIPageViewController, then move on to connecting them by programmatically navigating the UIPageViewController based on the selection in the UISegmentedControl. ...

So you have a UISearchBar like the one shown below. A user typing into a search bar is an ideal input data stream for Combine. Ideally, we’d access a string publisher based on user input like so. let searchBar = UISearchBar() let searchText = searchBar.textPublisher Alas, it does not exist. I also tried performing Key-Value Observing with Combine on the searchBar or its text field. searchBar.publisher(for: \.text) searchBar.searchTextField.publisher(for: \.text) It compiles but emits no events. ...

Ever wanted to quickly resize the simulator iOS screen so you can test how your view performs on smaller devices. Enter shake to debug. Shake is a good motion to use for presenting a debug menu because it’s easy to detect and can be done from anywhere. Whenever a user shakes their iPhone, the OS will call the motionEnded instance method of any UIResponder. As most UI elements inherit from UIResponder it’s easy to override motionEnded wherever we need, then display a debug menu when it happens. ...

The UIStackView class aligns arrangedSubviews in a column or row. It reduces the amount of auto layout code required for grid-like layouts. It also handles constraints dynamically when you add, hide, insert and remove subviews. By default stack views arrange subviews horizontally in a row. This article will use horizontal stack views for this reason. The logic can easily be applied to vertical stack views by changing the axis property to .vertical. ...