Topic

UI

A collection of 10 issues

DocumentGroup Breaks focusedSceneValue Propagation

I have already written about another gnarly bug around document-based apps in SwiftUI in a previous post. In that post, I found that on visionOS, any DocumentGroup scene would duplicate your view hierarchy, causing pretty funny looking visual overlaying glitches. It was most visible on visionOS due to the amount

Conditional SwiftUI View Modifiers are Evil

Custom modifiers in SwiftUI are a great way to reuse code. However, that should never lead to obfuscating semantics. And, unfortunately, most use cases for conditional modifiers do both of those things. Here's why.

Overuse and Misuse of Spacers in SwiftUI Code

When it comes to writing good user interface code, and code in general, it’s not exactly groundbreaking to claim that in any given situation, we should strive to use the right tool for the right job. When working with tools and frameworks that are designed to seem simple on

Document-based SwiftUI Apps on visionOS 2.4 are Unusable due to a Regression

TL;DR: As a result of a gnarly regression, every document-based SwiftUI app on visionOS 2.4 is duplicating views, rendering document-based app completely unusable on the platform. I was working on porting one of my side project apps from macOS to visionOS, and at some point wanted to test

Implementing a Modern SwiftUI Circular Progress Bar & Control

When I first wrote PZCircularControl in 2019, SwiftUI was still in its early days. The framework has matured significantly since then, introducing new features that enable interactions that were previously only achievable by dropping down to the Kits. Recently, I revisited the codebase and decided that a complete refactor of

SwiftUI's New Geometry Modifiers & Best Practices: onGeometryChange, onScrollGeometryChange, and More

SwiftUI has recently introduced a family of geometry observation APIs: onGeometryChange, onScrollGeometryChange, and onScrollPhaseChange. The former is back deployed all the way back to iOS 16 and macOS 13 Ventura. These new modifiers are a pretty big deal in a few ways.

SwiftUI FocusedValue, macOS Menus, and the Responder Chain

On macOS, you can use the SwiftUI FocusedValue API to achieve a behavior similar to that of the Responder Chain, including autoenabling menu items.

Vibrancy, NSAppearance, and Visual Effects in Modern AppKit and SwiftUI Apps

When working with NSVisualEffectView and vibrancy on macOS, it is somewhat common to find yourself in a situation where UI elements are not being rendered as you’d expect them to. Here are the possible problems the addition of vibrancy can cause, reasons behind them, and the tools at our disposal.

The Application Model is Outdated

The fundamental way we interact with computers hasn’t really changed since the 1980s. Sure, we’ve added more layers of complexity, polish, and buttons you wanna lick – but are things really that different?

The Bleakness of Chat Interfaces

If the future of user interfaces is text fields and chat bubbles, it’s probably a future I don’t wanna participate in shaping. But then of course it’s not.