Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History

day-022

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

parent directory

..
challenge
challenge
 
 
README.md
README.md
 
 

README.md

Day 22: Project 3

Follow along at https://www.hackingwithswift.com/100/22.

📒 Field Notes

This day covers the Project 3: Social Media in Hacking with Swift.

I have a separate repository where I've been creating projects alongside the material in the book. And you can find Project 3 here.

However, in addition to the project itself, this day also consisted of extending the finished app according to a set of challenges. With that in mind, I copied the old finished project to this repo and got started.

UIActivityViewController explained

Project 3 was all about introducing UIActivityViewController to the Storm Viewer app. Why? UIActivityViewController is one of iOS's main components for sharing application content to other services on the system: copying items to the pasteboard, posting to social media, attaching items to emails or SMS messages, and more — even adding content to custom services.

And it's pretty straightforward. After adding a share button to our detail controller's navbar and connecting it to an action handler function, we can create the UIActivityViewController in that function and present it.

@objc func shareButtonTapped() {
    guard let imageData = imageView.image?.jpegData(compressionQuality: 0.8) else {
        print("No image data found")
        return
    }

    let viewController = UIActivityViewController(activityItems: [imageData], applicationActivities: nil)

    viewController.popoverPresentationController?.barButtonItem = navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem

    present(viewController, animated: true)
}

The activityItems refer to the contents of our application that we want to share, and applicationActivities would be any custom services we wanted to add to the presented options.

⚠️ iPad Support

One gotcha with UIActivityViewController is that it needs an additional step during configuration in order to be compatible with iPads:

viewController.popoverPresentationController?.barButtonItem = navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem

The view controller's popoverPresentationController.barButtonItem needs to be assigned so that iPads know where to anchor the popover on the screen.

This will be ignored on iPhones, since the popoverPresentationController's view will always take up the entire screen — which I guess can be convenient, but I remember getting bit in a later project when I forgot about it, tested for a while on an iPhone, and didn't realize my code was destined to crash later on the iPad 🙀. So really, there's no reason not to set something up here from the start.

🥅 Challenges

Try adding the image name to the list of items that are shared. The activityItems parameter is an array, so you can add strings and other things freely. Note: Facebook won’t let you share text, but most other share options will.

🔗 Related Links