Matthew, Author at DevFright

How to Use UndoManager with SwiftData

April 18, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

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.

ToDo Download

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

April 17, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

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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Using .onAppear and .onDisappear in your SwiftUI Views

April 16, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

If you have come from a background using UIKit, you will have worked with ViewControllers and have seen several methods from the ViewController class that were called at certain times during the view loading. An example is viewDidLoad:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    // Custom setup code
    print("View has loaded.")
}

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How to Use the Slider in SwiftUI

April 15, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

The Slider has been around in iOS since the beginning. Apple included it in the SwiftUI framework beginning with iOS 13. The slider is a simple UI control that allows you to slide your finger across the screen and update a value behind the scenes. The last time I wrote about it was about 12 years ago demonstrating it with Objective-C code and a Storyboard. It’s time to provide a more current example.

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How to Create a Custom Loading Spinner in SwiftUI

April 14, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

When an app needs to take time to process something, such as waiting for a download or processing information, it’s ideal to provide a visual cue to show that something is happening. Depending on the task, you might choose to display a progress meter that estimates, or provides, the progress. Alternatively, you could simply show an animation to indicate that something is happening.

Today we’ll look at the latter and create a custom loading spinner.

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A Guide to the SwiftUI @Environment

April 12, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

The @Environment property wrapper in SwiftUI gives access to shared values across your app. Apple provides a wide range of values that are built-in to every app. These cover accessibility, layout, colours, and more. The system automatically updates the built-in environment values so that your app knows more about the environment it is running in.

Lets take a look at examples of the available @Environment values. The best way to explain is by diving into the code.

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Creating a Responsive SwiftUI Layout for iPhone and iPad (with Bonus Mac Compatibility)

April 11, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

Building an app that works on both iPhone and iPad isn’t particularly complicated. SwiftUI provides the necessary tools to adapt to different screen sizes so that users get the best experience for the device they are currently using.

In this tutorial we’ll look at how to build a responsive design that works on the smaller iPhone screen as well as the larger screens found on the iPad. As a bonus, we’ll use the “Mac (Designed for iPad)” setting in the target so that you can use the app on any Mac that uses Apple Silicon.

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Using Spacer and Divider for Layout in SwiftUI

April 10, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

The SwiftUI framework provides the tools you need to create the layout of your app. Two of these are the Spacer and Divider, both of which are views as they conform to the View protocol.

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How to Create a Singleton in Swift

April 9, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

When creating iPhone apps you will come across times when you can use single instance of a class across an entire app. Network manager, audio player, and other classes that Apple provides are called Singletons. It is one of the design patterns used in iOS app development.

A singleton ensures that only one instance of the class exists across the entire app. One example is App Settings, and another is a connection to a database where you probably want just a single connection.

Although singletons are relatively easy to create, meaning the syntax to allow a class to be a singleton, you need to be careful how you create it to avoid tight coupling and hidden dependencies.

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How to Use Your Personal Voice with AVSpeechSynthesizer

April 8, 2025 by Matthew Leave a Comment

A long time ago, back in 2013 and just prior to Swift launching, I created a tutorial in Objective-C called AVSpeechSynthesizer Tutorial – Letting Your App Speak Like Siri. A lot of things have changed since then in that we now have Swift, SwiftUI, and personalised voice. People with iPhone 12 or later, and various Mac and iPad devices, can spend time recording phrases on the screen, and after the device has processed those phrases, you then have a personalised voice that can be used in various places on the phone.

This tutorial looks at how to use AVSpeechSynthesizer to select your voice and get yourself to speak anything you type in.

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