Hey everyone,

Welcome to the first issue of iOS Unsigned, a newsletter where I strive to feature some standout iOS development resources that I thoroughly enjoyed. Keeping up with the tradition of unsigned, expect 8 guides in every issue.

In this issue, we’ve got an implementation of Dynamic Islands in SwiftUI, building widgets for the lock screen, creating live activities with ActivityKit, an exploration of rendering in SwiftUI, and four more goodies.

Happy reading,

Anupam

Updating SwiftUI Views From Objective-C Using MVVM by Max Kalik

Communicating between SwiftUI and UIKit is a fairly common task. But ever wondered how to display a SwiftUI view from an Objective-C codebase? Fear not as Max shows off a way to use SwiftUI in Objective-C codebases.

Exploring Rendering in SwiftUI by Riccardo Cipolleschi

When does SwiftUI re-render its components? Riccardo answers this and much more by building a small project that draws a comparison with React’s rendering mechanism. Unlike React, SwiftUI redraws its component when their properties change and not when the state change.

Create Live Activities With ActivityKit on iOS 16 by Batikan Sosun

While Live Activities and ActivityKit won’t be available in the first publicly released version of iOS 16, Batikan has a terrific tutorial on how to code Live Activities and thereby share real-time updates from your iOS app.

Lock Screen Widgets in SwiftUI by Natko Biscan

iOS 16 takes things up a notch by providing the ability to use widgets on the lock screen. That means the developers’ work is cut out. Natko has a decent tutorial on implementing widgets for your lock screen in iOS and watchOS.

Replicating the Dynamic Island Animation in SwiftUI by Aytuğ

Talking of notches, Apple has introduced a fancy new Dynamic Islands — a pill-shaped UX to interact with notifications and alerts. While we’re still waiting for the latest iPhone, Aytuğ already has a SwiftUI implementation that replicates that experience.

Creating GitHub Build Status Badges for Xcode Cloud Builds by Joe Diragi

Xcode Cloud doesn’t have status badges at the moment. So Joe shows how to build one using Deno and TypeScript.

Generating PDFs Dynamically Using PDFKit in Swift by Marc Daou

Marc’s tutorial shows how to spin up a cocktail PDF menu using a public API. How about expanding upon this guide to zip your articles into a PDF? The possibilities of using PDFKit are endless.

Customizing toolbars in SwiftUI by Majid Jabrayilov

Majid explores the new Toolbar APIs to customize toolbars in your SwiftUI app.