Month: July 2020

Server Driven UI

Update 2023-03-29: In August 2021 Apple acquired Primephonic the company. On March 28, 2023 Apple launched Apple Music Classical as a new app. This new app is built on the foundations of the Primephonic app, the fundamentals of the Server Driven UI architecture as described in this post remain the same.

Note: This post is based on a talk I gave at CocoaHeadsNL in July 2020. Warning: because this is based on a transcription of a talk, sentences and wording may be weird or incoherent. The original talk, including a live Q&A afterwards, can be seen here:

Over the years, I’ve build many different types of apps. However in one aspect they’ve all been very similar; In the client/server architecture, the server sends domain objects to the client (encoded in JSON), and the client renders these domain objects to some pretty UI.

Server Driven UI is different. The server does not send domain objects, with the client having to decide how to render those. Instead, the server decides what and how to render, and just sends instructions to the client. You know, kinda like HTML…

(Honestly, it’s not HTML… But it sort of is. But really, it isn’t)

Continue reading “Server Driven UI”

@CloudStorage property wrapper

I wrote a Swift library to help with prototyping (haven’t used it yet in production apps).

CloudStorage is property wrapper that will save values in iCloud key-value storage. These values are persisted across app restarts and will sync between different devices that are signed into the same iCloud account. This property wrapper is similar to AppStorage and SceneStorage, two new types Apple introduced with iOS 14.

The basic API is the same as for AppStorage; add @CloudStorage("someName") in front of a property, to save the value to iCloud key-value storage.

Usage

Make sure you enable the “key-value storage” service in the iCloud capability. See Apple’s documenation.


@CloudStorage("readyForAction") var readyForAction: Bool = false
@CloudStorage("numberOfItems") var numberOfItems: Int = 0
@CloudStorage("orientation") var orientation: String?

See also the example app in the repository.

For what should this be used?

The same caveats apply as with key-value storage itself:

Key-value storage is for discrete values such as preferences, settings, and simple app state.
Use iCloud key-value storage for small amounts of data: stocks or weather information, locations, bookmarks, a recent documents list, settings and preferences, and simple game state. Every app submitted to the App Store or Mac App Store should take advantage of key-value storage.

From Apple’s documentation on choosing the proper iCloud Storage API.

In general, key-value storage is not meant as a general purpose syncing service. If you need any advanced capabilities to prevent data loss, consider using CloudKit instead.

Check out the CloudStorage repository.