Some time ago, I struggled with controlling the App startup process, in order to achieve a defined setup during test execution — for instance, not to have the default database active.

As a newbie to SwiftUI, the solution may not be obvious at first sight. However, because it’s pretty simple, I’d like to share with you here.

Usually, you have one entry point in SwiftUI. It can be recognized by the @main directive:

@main struct AppMain {...}

This directive tells SwiftUI that this shall be the first code to be executed (after some internal stuff, of course).

We can now…

Being on the way of working with TCA in a potentially large application, the benefits of using TCA become more and more obvious in a variety of scopes.

In this article, I’d like to share my experience in “Thinking TCA” by building a small component that presents a Form row that can be tapped; when tapped, it expands and shows a picker for a set of values; after picking a value, the row display is updated. And the row can be collapsed, certainly…

A very subjective view on a change of strategy

Preface: It is not so easy to identify a solution that fits a customer’s needs. If and when you succeeded by establishing a Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket environment that works perfectly well, it is even more frustrating if something happens like it did some days ago, knowing that the customer will never accept that. From many comments I read throughout the last days, it seems that this frustration is shared by many, so I decided to write this small and very subjective article.

Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket — tools used by many. Several companies I’ve…

(Be warned: This is long stuff, and it’s not complete code. It’s more of a journey into concepts and usage, so it’ll take you some time.)

There seems to a new source of hype growing. While iOS/macOS architectures were mainly driven by MVC, MVVM, or Clean Swift (or others) up until now, SwiftUI, introduced two years ago, sets a different paradigm, where many of these architectures don’t perfectly fit in.

Over the years, we’ve experimented with a variety of approaches in order to find the right one for our application, which needs a heavy rework due to architectural and therefore…

Again, I ran into a problem with Xcode that is not too obvious to solve. So I’d like to share my experience with you, so that you can prevent this situation.

The situation: You’re starting tests, and you get a result like this:

No update of the test result indicators — just black diamonds.

Well, I tried several searches, without a result. Nothing helped. The diamonds remained black.

Then, I remembered a similar problem long time ago with a different codebase (the above appeared with a new project I set up).

And I got a clue what was happening.

(Drum…

Although the TextField provides several standard features, you might want to have a floating label as shown above.

How do you do this with SwiftUI?

Step 1: Create a view

Just the standard business. We need two values: the placeholder text, and the text to display.

Step 2: Add a model

The model is set based on the given initial values.

And we need some initialization for it:

Step 3: Build the view

Now we can use the model’s properties to build the basic view:

What we’re doing here: we overlay the text for the placeholder and the text field, thus separating both. …

Using a SwiftUI list is a convenient way to use all the auto-mechanisms to insert, remove, or move rows.

However, if you add a new entry, there is no official way to scroll to the bottom of the list where the new entry was added. So, I tried to find a solution. You’ll find a couple of questions on Stack Overflow but no real nice solution (I did not want to replace the list with a wrapped UITableView).

By chance, I found a library called Introspect that gives access to most of the UIKit stuff behind the SwiftUI elements.

My…

Note 19-mar-2020: In the meantime, I went much deeper into the question how a scrollable tab view with animations can be realized using pure SwiftUI. I came up with a solution that is published on GitHub.

While the solution described in my previous article is working pretty well for the displayed tabs, it has a problem when the “More…” tab is used and a view controller from there is selected. In this case, the didSelect delegate function will not be called.

I’ll describe here a modification to the above solution that is also able to handle that situation.

ViewControllers instead of TabItems

First, we…