iCloud and screen sizes

I've now launched Reps on the app store. This week I looked into how I can persist recorded data, and adjusted layouts for smaller screens.

TODO Check-in #

Last week I set out a bunch of tasks of various sizes that I hoped to tackle this week. I managed to clear up most of them, including:

For the latter, I used a state variable isScrolling to determine when the scrollTo action is called, and when true set the animation's opacity to 0. I added a bit of animation too, like so:

.opacity(isScrolling ? 0 : 1)
.animation(.easeOut, value: isScrolling)

The tricky part though was setting isScrolling to true. This had to happen within a child view, so I passed the Bool in as a Binding, so I can change it in the child view's saving action. This seems to work well.

So after these optimisations, I also took on some new items this week. Saving to iCloud, and optimising for smaller screens.

iCloud #

There are two types of data stored in my app. One is UserDefaults, which includes things like the current weekly training routine and the user's progression level in each exercise. The other is the Journal data, which is stored in SwiftData.

I've not managed to work out an easy way to backup and sync the UserDefaults yet, though I believe there are ways to do so (I could for example check if the UserDefault values are not set, then check for an iCloud version of same to hydrate them on first use - maybe next week).

So I decided to make use of this handy guide on saving SwiftData to iCloud. Turns out it was very easy, once I'd activated iCloud in the Signing & Capabilities settings section. One change I did have to make was to give my model default values in the init method. Once I had done that, I could see the syncing happening in the console when testing locally and on-device.

So now, if I reinstall the app, it should pull down the important training history.

Screen size adjustments #

I found that my record exercise screens were overflowing the height of smaller screen phones such as the iPhone SE and 12 Mini. To work around this, I decided to adjust the size of various elements based on the given screen height.

To get this, I found an extension for UIScreen (in this StackOverflow answer):

extension UIScreen {

    /// Retrieve the (small) width from portrait mode
    static var portraitWidth : CGFloat { return min(UIScreen.main.bounds.width, UIScreen.main.bounds.size.height) }

    /// Retrieve the (big) height from portrait mode
    static var portraitHeight : CGFloat { return max(UIScreen.main.bounds.size.width, UIScreen.main.bounds.size.height)  }

    /// Retrieve the (big) width from landscape mode
    static var landscapeWidth : CGFloat { return max(UIScreen.main.bounds.size.width, UIScreen.main.bounds.size.height) }

    /// Retrieve the (small) height from landscape mode
    static var landscapeHeight : CGFloat { return min(UIScreen.main.bounds.size.width, UIScreen.main.bounds.size.height) }
}

Using this I checked for screens under 700 points in height, and set the animation size to a smaller value. I think I'll need to do more testing when I revisit the design, as it's very rough currently, but at least it works. Small steps!

Current TODO list #

Based on what I learned this week, I'd like to work on the following this week:

The last one is going to be a core feature of this app, and one I'd hope to refine over time. I've got to start somewhere though so I think I'll aim for something super-simple and work from there.

Thanks for reading, and if you want to see my app as it is built, you can try Reps for free.