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.

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.

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.

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.

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.