DevFright

Learn How to Create iOS Apps

How to Use Annotation and Marker on a SwiftUI Map

by Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

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

by Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

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

by Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

Handling Deep Links in SwiftUI with URL Schemes

by Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

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

by Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…]

How to Use UndoManager with SwiftData

by 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.

ToDoDownload
[Read more…]

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

by 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.

[Read more…]

How to Use the Slider in SwiftUI

by 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.

[Read more…]