DevFright

Learn How to Create iOS Apps

Using ScrollViewReader for Programmatic Scrolling in SwiftUI: A Tutorial

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Some apps can benefit from being able to programatically scroll to a specific item in a ScrollView. Apple provides the means to do this with the ScrollViewReader. By calling scrollTo and providing it a position of the item, you can programatically have the items scrolled to the correct location.

This is particularly useful for apps such as chat messages, emails, or anything that lists items. For chat messages, you may want to scroll back up to the first unread message.

Lets take a look at how this works.

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How to Use Annotation and Marker on a SwiftUI Map

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I have written about MapKit a few times before such as a tutorial about adding a Map to your SwiftUI app and the MKPointAnnotation tutorial from back in 2013, which uses Swift and UIKit.

In this tutorial we’ll look at using the Annotation and Marker structures that provide the means to getting annotations on your map to mark locations.

SwiftUI makes it easy to display locations on a map. For apps that target iOS 16 or later, Annotation and Marker are the way to go. For those that are targetting lower versions of iOS the equivelant to Marker is MapMarker and the equivalent of Annotation is MapAnnotation. Today we’ll look at Marker and Annotation.

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How to Use ShareLink in SwiftUI to Share Text, Images, and URLs

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The iPhone, for years, has given users the ability to share items with other users. This capability has been around since iOS 6 in the form of UIActivityViewController that allows you to share items like photos, text, websites, files with other services.

Apple created a new way to share items with the introduction of ShareLink. This was first available in iOS 16 and is part of SwiftUI. Apple has conveniently built this into a View that is simple to use.

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How to build a Clipboard History App with UIPasteboard, Images, and Strings in SwiftUI

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In yesterdays tutorial about how to use the UIPasteboard, I pointed out that UIPasteboard can only store a single item and if you replace a string with a string, the old one gets overwritten, and likewise, if you replace a string with an image, or vice-verse, only the newest is kept.

In this tutorial we are going to create a simple way of storing history of what is in your clipboard/pasteboard.

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Handling Deep Links in SwiftUI with URL Schemes

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Swift makes it easy to allow deep links into your app. Deep links are especially helpful when wanting to direct users straight to specific content. One way I use deep links is sending emails to my task manager. When I see the task, I can click on a link and it opens up the Mail app on my Mac or iPhone directly into the app. Another use is Evernote. I can tap on a link and have the Evernote app open with the content I want to see.

You will see these links as message://link_to_some_page/id or evernote://some_note

Lets take a look at how this works.

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How to Build a Native QR Code Generator for iPhone with SwiftUI

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iPhone has had the ability to generate QR codes since iOS 5 that was released in 2011, yet, it is something that I have never used before in an iPhone app. QR codes are useful for many things from putting a URL on a flyer that someone can scan to visit a web address to showing on your phone to connect to a friend. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how a QR code is generated on the iPhone.

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How to Use UndoManager with SwiftData

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SwiftData is a framework that is built on top of Core Data and greatly simplifies working with data in your SwiftUI app. One caveat is that not all functionality of Core Data can be found in SwiftData. In this turorial we’ll look at the UndoManager that tracks changes and allows you to undo and redo changes you have made. This can be extremely useful for apps that implement SwiftData. SwiftData makes this process extremely simple to configure.

Lets begin with the app created in the ToDo List app with SwiftData. You can download this below.

ToDoDownload
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Exploring SwiftUI Picker Styles: Date, Selection, Graphical, Inline etc…

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The Picker has been around since iOS 2 and is known as the UIPickerView in UIKit. It joined SwiftUI in iOS 13 as “Picker”. As well as the Picker view, there is also the DatePicker view that you will also be familiar with using in apps.

The regular Picker also has a modifier called .pickerStyle that you can attach to that view where you can pass in various picker styles that conform to the PickerStyle protocol. In this tutorial we’ll look over some of these to show you ways how you might provide ways for your users to input the required information.

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