Just over a week ago I launched Retrospective Timelines in the App Store. In fact, “launched” may be too strong of a word. I released the app on Sunday Dec 1, 2019 with little fanfare and even less of an idea of what I was doing. Over the months leading up to version 1.0 I had a lot of ideas about how the launch could go. I thought about trying to build up some excitement for the app and I considered reaching out to press in advance.
Every time I thought I was close to shipping the app something would change that would cause a delay. Sometimes a SwiftUI update would break something I had previously finished. Other times I would start to think about solving a problem in a new way. Knowing myself pretty well, I began to recognize that I could keep working on version 1.0 indefinitely without ever shipping a thing. I needed get something out and I needed to do it soon.
In early November I decided that I had to ship something by Dec 1 and I began to work backwards from that. I did everything I could to finish the features I was building, although I had to pull a few things at the last minute. By the time had the app in a suitable state for shipping I was running out of time on my deadline. I knew that I had no chance of getting attention on such short notice so I decided not to even try.
Retrospective Timelines hit the App Store and I mentioned it on Twitter. Aside from that, there was no launch.
Over the next few months I hope to get some attention on the app. I’m convinced that a lot of people could benefit from thinking accomplishments and I hope to get the app in their hands. As I add new features I’ll continue to talk about the app on Twitter and on my podcast Project Update.
In the future maybe I’ll be able to learn how to launch the “right way” but for now this will have to do. At least it’s out there and in some weird way that’s the most important thing right now.
I’ve had a longstanding issue in Retrospective Timelines. I have a simple EditButton on the list of timelines in my app. This button toggles the list into edit mode where the user can perform several actions.
Reorder timelines
Delete a timeline
Tap a button to open the timeline in a modal view so they can edit it.
Timeline List Edit Mode
The issue was that when I closed the modal view with a button, sometimes the EditButton on the list view would stop working. Looking at the view hierarchy in debug mode I could see that a containing object for the button was way out of position, and thus the button would stop working. I could sometimes get it snap back into position by swiping up and down on the list, but that is not really a viable solution. I needed a way to solve this.
This is a video I send to Apple as part of the feedback report (FB7265174). You can see the out-of-place container object.
I was once again banging my head on this issue today, trying to see if I could come up with a solution. While working through some options, I noticed that this only happed to SwiftUI Buttons, not to other types of objects in the navigation bar. I made a simple Text view and gave it an onTagGuesture modifier with a call to toggle the edit mode.
This worked, but I lost the nice animations that SwiftUI was taking care of for me. I came across this post on StackOverflow and modified my view to use this bool version of Edit Mode instead of the the default one that SwiftUI provides. Here is a rough approximation
struct ContentView: View {
@State var isEditing = false
var names = ["Item 1", "Item 2", "Item 3"]
var body: some View {
NavigationView {
VStack {
List(names, id: \.self) { name in
Text(name)
}
.environment(\.editMode, .constant(self.isEditing ? EditMode.active : EditMode.inactive)).animation(Animation.spring())
}
.navigationBarItems(trailing: trailingButton)
}
}
private var trailingButton: some View {
Text(self.isEditing == true ? "Done" : "Edit")
.contentShape(Rectangle())
.frame(height: 44, alignment: .trailing)
.onTapGesture {
self.$isEditing.wrappedValue.toggle()
}
}
}
This sample code strips away all of the additional logic from my Timeline List view, but it shows how to implement the alternative version of the edit button as a Text view. Finally I have a reliable way to toggle edit mode in SwiftUI.
I’m making progress on the user interface for the app. Most of my time has been spent on making the Event List views look the way I want. I’ve also updated the Event Edit view with a new timeline picker and a long form text view for editing notes.
Timeline and Event List views side by side. I Added a new top level report called Ongoing that will show all ongoing records from active timelines.
Report list views. These contain an extra timeline element. These list views show data from all active timelines, active meaning “not archived”.
Timeline to Event List to Event Edit.
Event Edit View now contains a long form text view. This uses a UITextView wrapped in SwiftUI. It’s far from perfect but it’s good enough, at least until Apple ships a SwiftUI multi-line text field.
Event Edit View now contains a custom timeline picker.
This morning I made a custom version of a picker for the events form. I needed a way for events to select a different timeline. The default picker in SwiftUI had some limitations so I set out to make my own. The only main difference is that it uses a sectioned list with timelines sorted into non-archived and archived sections. I made a binding variable to pass in the selected timeline. This allowed me to update the selected timeline from the picker view, then just close it when done.
struct TimelinePicker: View {
@Binding var selectedTimeline: Timeline?
@ObservedObject var dataSource = RADDataSource<Timeline>()
@Environment(\.presentationMode) var presentationMode: Binding<PresentationMode>
var body : some View {
List {
ForEach(dataSource.loadSectionedDataSource(sort: self.getSort(), predicate: nil, sectionKeyPathName: "isArchived"), id: \.name) { listSection in
Section(header:
HStack {
Text(listSection.name == "1" ? "Archived Timelines" : "Timelines")
}
.font(.system(.headline, design: .rounded))
) {
ForEach(self.dataSource.objects(inSection: listSection)) { timeline in
Button(action: ({
self.selectedTimeline = timeline
self.presentationMode.wrappedValue.dismiss()
})) {
HStack {
TimelineListRowView(timeline: timeline)
.foregroundColor(.primary)
Spacer()
if(self.selectedTimeline == timeline) {
Image(systemName: "checkmark")
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
public func getSort() -> [NSSortDescriptor] {
...
}
}
It just would not work though. I tried several ways of passing in the timeline, binding, observed object, environment object, etc. Nothing would work. Every time I closed the picker the initial value remained set on the events form.
Turns out that’s because I’m an idiot. I was using a call to onAppear to load data from the event record into a View Model class. This was running every time I closed the timeline picker. I would set the initial value, go to the picker, select a new value, and then close the picker which would call onAppear to set the initial value again.
The fix for this was super simple. I just added a new state variable called onAppearCalled and initialized it to false. Then I could check this condition in the function that populates my form when onAppear is called, setting it to true when it is called.
In Project Settings, select the target and add some entitlements.
iCloud – Add this entitlement and select the “CloudKit” checkbox. Use the default container for your project or select one from the list if you have already created one.
Background Modes – Add this entitlement and select the checkbox for “Remote notifications
That’s it really. From here you can start to work with SwiftUI views by adding the context into the environment for the initial view.
let contentView = ContentView().environment(\.managedObjectContext, context)
I’ve been spending a lot of time today thinking about the row for the list of event dates. This has been something I’ve been sort of stuck on for the last couple of weeks. This list is a bit tricky because the data on it is not strictly events. The rows represent date records related to events. All events have at least one date (the single date or start date field) but they can optionals have an end date to form a date range. The ending date can be set to a specific date or set to an “ongoing” status where the event will show up as something that hasn’t ended yet.
For a couple of weeks I was including the ongoing date rows in this list, sorted by the current date. I decided to omit them for now. They always looked a bit out of place to me.
Here are several versions of a new design for these rows. I think I’m going to use the 6th and last option. I removed the circle indicators from the row entirely. The capsule around one of the dates indicates that the date is the one for the row. For example: You can see two rows for the event called “A date range”. It shows up in the list of sorted dates for both its start and end dates. I also decided to make everything in the list content region use the selected color for the timeline, in this case red.
I spent a little time this evening playing with app icon ideas. This is the one I like the most so far.
Light Icon
Dark Icon
Brand Icon
Update: 2019.10.30 I made my first round of revisions of these. I added some gradients and I replaced the white color with a light grey and I think looks pretty nice.
There are some issues with the NavigationView in SwiftUI that prevent the Master Detail version from showing the back button in portrait mode. To get around this I’m using StackNavigationViewStyle. This is OK on most iPads, but on the larger iPad Pro models in landscape it looks ridiculous.
This is my attempt to get around this issue. I added a frame to the list/form object on each of these layouts.
This caps the maxWidth at 700pt. While this works as intended it does’t look great. On the layouts using GroupedListStyle I was able to match the background, but it would look much better if I could round the section corners. iOS 13 has a new grouped style for that but it has not made it to SwiftUI yet.
On the layout using DefaultListStyle this looks a little better. The only thing I don’t care for the section header. If I could remove the background color it would look much better.
If you know of a workaround for rounding the List Sections please let me know.
Up until now I’ve been using separate views for Event Detail (view only) and Event Edit. I decided to try to combine these into one view and work them into the main navigation stack. This way event data entry can be done without opening a modal. Adding a new event will still be done in a modal though.
I have two versions of this.
Option 1 is pretty much the old event edit view with some “time passed” calculations in the section footers below the dates.
Option 1
Option 2 is a version where I renamed the segmented control for End Date and changed the labels. Instead of asking the user to select what type of end date they want (none, closed, ongoing) I ask them what type of event they want (single date, date range, ongoing event). I think this helps clear up some confusion as it’s much easier to explain what an event type is then it was trying to explain the nuances of end dates.
Update: 10/22/2019
Dave and I discussed these options on Project Update episode 17 yesterday and he gave me some ideas. We both agreed that option two was the better choice out of the options above. Dave had a couple of suggestions.
Change the Ongoing icon back to the empty circle to differentiate them from end dates.
Change the Event Type control to omit the Ongoing option. Users can select either Single Date or Date Range
If the user selects Date Range as the Event Type then show an additional control in the End Date section where they can mark an end date as Ongoing.
This is my first pass at implementing these suggestions. I added a toggle to the End Date section. If this is false (default) then the date picker will show. Otherwise the date picker will hide and the Ongoing symbol is shown with the label.
Event Detail modified Ongoing controls
Side note: the End Date section footer in this image has not been updated to omit the time passed string when an end date is set to Ongoing.
I’m not sure if I like this change or not. It might be a little easier to understand, which is the most important factor for this screen.
