Seriously easy iOS Quick Actions

I have been googling around for a good simple tutorial on how to add a simple quick action to my iOS application. This will not be dynamic. No custom images. Just the most simple possible version of a working iOS quick action.

Getting Something in The Menu

The first thing you need to do is to get something to show up in the menu when you 3D touch (I’m not sure what to call this action). To do this you need to add an entry into your application’s info.plist file.

Make it look like this:

Basically, you need to tell the app what the title should be. And then what message you want to send to your app when someone hits this action. For me I am sending the number 5, as a string, I tried using a number but the menu item stopped showing up. So, I’m now using a string. This is what it looks like when you ‘force press’? on the app icon.

Not pretty. But it works. The next step is doing something when someone hits that button.

Doing Something

Now that we have a button, we should do something when it’s tapped. Luckily, all we need to do is implement one method:

Inside of that method you will get the UIApplicationShortcutItem that object will tell you which action was taken. In my case, that item will be the string “5”. Which means start a 5 minute timer. That’s it.

Thanks for reading.

If you want a Big Timer, it’s open source and on the App Store: https://github.com/joelklabo/BigTimer