With watchOS 7, you can now add multiple complications to your app, exposing different types of views onto your data. Whilst the demo at WWDC 2020 showed how to add multiple complications, it did not detail how to handle interacting with them. For a good user experience when a complication is tapped, you want to open your app in a state that’s relevant to that particular complication.

This article will show you how to add different complications, update them when their descriptions change, and also respond to a particular complication type being tapped.

For our example, we’ll create a simple tabbed watch app showing the headline of three publications. You will be able to add any of these publications to a watch face, and when tapped, it will open the app with the correct tab showing. …

Managing All the Things

As an indie developer, you don’t have anyone else to rely on to do certain tasks. You’re responsible for everything pre- and post-launch:

• Idea creation — You have that little lightbulb moment and you need to get that down quickly and flesh out a few points you’re trying to achieve with it.
• Functional aspects — As your idea grows, you start thinking about how people will use the app and what they will expect to be able to do.
• Technical requirements — All the behind-the-scenes stuff you’ll need to implement and either re-use or research if it’s the first time you’ve ever done a particular thing. …

Color pickers are used frequently in both iOS and Mac apps to differentiate folders/lists/items in Apple’s own app’s like Shortcuts and Reminders and many indie app’s offer similar functionality.

With SwiftUI 2 Apple added the ColorPicker control and you think great, one quick line of code and I have a color picker, but this isn’t constrained, users can pick any color imaginable, great for paint apps, not so great where we are trying to maintain a style to our app and deal with overlaid text or graphics.

Recently watching a non-tech family member discover they can customize their messaging app and the awful contrast choices made you really don’t want to let users have this much power. Even Apple don’t use the generic full palette picker in their apps, instead providing a curated palette to choose from, colors that they know will look good. …

I recently started a new side project in a language (Perl) and framework (Logitech Media Server aka Slim Server) I’d never used before. This combination and my lack of experience meant there was no way of debugging. It was logging everything and muddling your way through.

Don’t panic! What I’m going to describe is completely agnostic to the language/frameworks used.

I use Visual Studio Code as my editor of choice for most things these days and I was getting fed up with typing the same old things over and over, so I looked into what options VS Code had to make some of this repetition easier. …

SwiftUI allows you to very easily create action sheets, those slide up dialog’s that almost fill the screen in iOS. There are many different ways to create these but most have subtle side effects, from un-clickable toolbar buttons to un-dismissable sheets. In this article I’ll detail how to reliably create multiple toolbar buttons that display multiple action sheets with buttons to dismiss them.

We are using functionality that is part of SwiftUI 2 supported by iOS 14 and up. If you are targeting anything lower this will not work.

Creating the sheet views

We’ll create the action sheet views first to stop Xcode continually throwing errors about the views not existing when we create the main content view. We’ll create two views, one for Settings which just has a Done button and one for an Add which has the typical Cancel and Done buttons. …