DevFright

Learn How to Create iOS Apps

How to use a SwiftUI Form

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The SwiftUI Form view gives the ability to organsise views how you need them. Forms are typilcally used on settings pages and other similar places. In this tutorial we’ll look at using a Form and how to nest a TextField, Picker, and DatePicker.

Deciding wether to use a Form or a List, for example, depends on what you need. A Form is typically used for smaller amount of organised views, like a settings page, although you can iterate within a Form and show many items. One example could be that your profile has tags with your achievements in. You could get your achievements from Swift Data, and then iterate over them in a Form.

There are no hard and fast rules on what to choose, so please do experiment to see what provides the correct look for your application.

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How to Use UIViewRepresentable – More AI Writing Tool Features

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SwiftUI is great for creating views for your iPhone application, but sometimes you need UIKit to fill some gaps. UIViewRepresentable provides a way to bridge the gap between UIKit and SwiftUI by wrapping a UIKit view and allowing you to use that view in SwiftUI.

I recently wrote about bringing Writing Tools to SwiftUI, but as mentioned in that tutorial, SwiftUI is limited and only brings a small part of the available features. The only feature available to a TextEditor in regards to writing tools is .writingToolsBehavior.

In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to bring a UIKit view into SwiftUI.

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How to Add Haptic Feedback to Your SwiftUI

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Haptics have for a long time been part of the iPhone experience, so much so that SwiftUI implements them as standard in some views. In a recent tutorial about adding swipe actions for a to-do list, without planning for it, haptics were part of this thanks to SwiftUI.

For the most part you can leave the default haptics as they are because iPhone users are familiar with haptics and what they mean. If you start to change them for a swipe, then it can just add confusion. However, SwiftUI does include the ability to make some changes to them with sensoryFeedback(). We’ll take a look at these in this tutorial to see what sensoryFeedback can do.

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How to use Apple Intelligence Writing Tools in SwiftUI

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Apple Intelligence launched with iOS 18, and along with that, several tools that can be integrated into your app. These include:

  • Writing Tools
  • Image Playground
  • Genmoji
  • Siri with App Intents

In this tutorial we’ll look at Writing Tools which brings Apple Intelligence to your app. However, to dig deeper into using Writing Tools, you’ll need to use a UIKit view. We’ll look at that in the next tutorial. For now, lets take a look at this VERY brief tutorial as writing tools in SwiftUI is limited to what is baked in.

Apple has added support to some text views, so if you use a TextEditor, for example, you can access writing tools in the normal way and proofread, rewrite, or ask for suggestions for the text you have entered.

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Building a Search Feature in SwiftUI with Array Filtering

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In todays tutorial we’re going to build a very simple list that you can search by using the filter in an Array. The concept is really quite simple, but good to also be aware of for when you might decide to filter on the frontend of the app.

Lets begin by creating a data model that will contain a published array:

class DataModel: ObservableObject {
    @Published var items: [String] = [
        "Ford", "Vauxhall", "Ferrari", "Lamborghini", "Aston Martin", "Nissan", "Bentley"
    ]
}

The DataModel we use is a class. We conform to the ObservableObject protocol and use the @Published property wrapper. If the array of strings called items is changed, then the @Published property wrapper will notify any view that uses this ObservableObject that a change has happend. The view will then update.

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Building a Widget Extension for iOS – Part 2

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In part 1 of building a widget extension for iOS, we got a very basic Widget built that has some custom UI that shows the beginnings of a pomodoro timer. You can download part 1 below, although if you are new to this tutorial I would recommend starting at Part 1 to follow along each step so you are more familiar with how we got here.

PomodoroDownload

In this part of the tutorial, we’ll look at cleaning up the widget ready for making it work in part 3.

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Building a Widget Extension for iOS – Part 1

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WidgetKit launched with iOS 14 and provides a way for users to be able to see and interact with your app without launching your app. Widgets come in various sizes and when defined in your app, allows the user to put them on the home screen.

Widgets aim to provide users with quick access to essential information. They can also be interacted with, making them versatile tools for displaying and managing data.

In this tutorial we’ll look at a simple Pomodoro timer app, with adjustable intervals.

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Creating Custom Modifiers for SwiftUI Views

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When creating views in SwiftUI you will almost certainly use View Modifiers to adjust how a view looks from its font, to border, to colours, and so on. It is not uncommon to have serveral modifiers applied to each item in the view to get the look that you desire.

SwiftUI provides a way to group these modifiers together so that you can apply them as a group. There are a few benefits to this:

First, it cleans up the code in your view because you can have just a single custom modifier applied and keep all of the details encapsulated elsewhere in the code.

Second, it allows you to reuse the same group of modifiers elsewhere in the app so that you can keep your code DRY (don’t repeat yourself). A change in the custom modifier would affect all views that use the custom modifier.

In this tutorial we’ll look at how we can create our own custom modifier and how this can be applied to a view.

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A Look at CompactMap, Map, and when to use them

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A map in Swift provides a way to transform data. There are several types of map, but we’ll just look at compactMap and map today.

Both of these maps are similar in what they accomplish, that is, transform data. Often you will transform elements of a sequence into a new collection with transformed values.

To help clear this up we’ll look at some examples of when this might be useful.

Lets first look at compactMap. This method is used when you have an array that might contain nil values that you want to remove, or perhaps have data that you cannot work with. A compactMap removes the nil values leaving just the values that it can work with.

let numbers = ["1", "2", "three", "4", "five"]
let convertedNumbers = numbers.compactMap { Int($0) }
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How to Save Text Files with SwiftUI

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Prior to iOS 16, FileManager needed to be used to save text files to the document directory of your app. Although FileManager needs to be used for some tasks, such as getting the contents of a directory, moving, copying, deleting files, and so on, the ability to save a text file is now available in the String class.

Files are stored in the documents directory of your app, which is sandboxed. If you delete your app, then those files will be deleted with it. With this in mind, make sure you understand the implications of this, as you may need to work with FileManager to save documents in iCloud if you want to keep them safe for your user. We’ll cover this in a different tutorial.

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