Seb Vidal

Here it is! What's New in UIKit in iOS 26. This was a pretty mammoth undertaking, and it shows – a whopping 64 minute read! I'll be keeping this article up to date over the beta cycle. Possibly littered with errors. Shout at me if I've made any stupid mistakes. Link below 👇

@No_Wham @EthanLipnik @benvargas @polpielladev FYI

@EthanLipnik @benvargas @SebJVidal FYI

@EthanLipnik i just tried to demo Mirage to some mates, and honestly, it was a painful experience 😭 has something broken in the last few updates ?

@lambdadigamma Yep. Totally agree. The counter point to my original post is perhaps Apple are removing this because they _hate_ developers hijacking it for action buttons 😄

@SebJVidal Imho, removing it would be a pity: e.g. in Apple Music, I love to be able to quickly jump to search in the collapsed state and there it really makes sense to have the compact state where you have quick access to the search and the current playback.

I hope the tab bar’s auxiliary placement of UISearchTabs remains and teams within Apple are just using UITabs instead…but I’m not hopeful. I really don’t mind third parties using the search tab as a floating action button to present a sheet, for example. Maybe search tabs becoming integrated with the tab bar is paving the way for this to be official API?

@ps3zocker Yeah…not sure. Perhaps the tab bar would morph into the search bar? Admittedly, I don’t like the back pedalling…

@SebJVidal What happens to bottom search bars then? I guess the bar itself will be back to the top like in the App Store right now. A total mess.

New official Android feature was just announced: they didn't even change the color scheme 🥹

@RobSwish @SnazzyLabs When did he say this 😭

@SnazzyLabs I often agree with your takes but your take that SwiftUI saved Mac dev and the language out lived it's creator is a little out of touch from how developers feel.

@vistar941 Yeah, vending your own presentation controller is pretty standard when implementing the UIViewControllerTransitioningDelegate protocol. Can’t remember off the top of my head what the custom activity view controller presentation controller does though :)

@SebJVidal Have you ever initialized and used UISheetPC or UIPopoverPC directly with the public initWithPresentedVC...? I noticed _UIActivityViewControllerPresentationController takes this approach, and now I’m kind of curious 👀

@No_Wham @anatelorenzen What a nerd…

@anatelorenzen Isn’t the heart rate reading and stuff not good this way? They specifically mention to put it on the top

My brother figured this out ages ago. Whoop on an Omega.

@tylerangert How have you found working with PhotoKit? Been a little limiting in my experience…goldmine for SPI, however 😄

haha it all goes hand in hand :) but yes most of the work here is actually not metal at all but mostly in caching infrastructure. which is funny because now i can use the same caching semantics across the photo grid, a map view, and even piping photos out of disk and into an embedding model etc

Full 120fps scrolling. Zoom next :-)

@tylerangert Looking forward to it! I can well imagine architecture might have had to play second fiddle to the infrastructure required to get this working as well as it does. 100% worth it though!

@SebJVidal will share more soon when the whole thing is done - also lots of tradeoffs in architecture for lazy texture generation vs. precomputing up front etc, fallbacks / coordination with direct PhotoKit requests

@jdocampom_0117 Yep, it is 🤦‍♂️ Note to self: RTFD!

@SebJVidal I thought updateVisibleMenu was public since iOS 15 or 14 🤔

@nathantannar4 🤦‍♂️ that’s my cue to quit for the day…

@SebJVidal Isn’t update visible menu public?

@jacobtechtavern “Replace {} brace syntax with Python-style indentation”

Are you considering proposing a new keyword to Swift Evolution? First, check this official list of commonly rejected changes! github.com/swiftlang/swif…

@cifilter What was your approach here? Keyframe animation?

I made this paginated card stack for Dia a while ago. It's actually really tricky to get cards to shuffle without them just phasing through each other. Especially hard for non-square aspect views.

@JensVanSteen @khairilushan You can achieve this by hiding the UIScrollView’s edge effect for your given edge, and just relying on your scroll edge element container interaction I believe :) That being said, I just use palettes for accessibility and pre-26 support

Correct that it’s iOS 26 only. As for it not being part of the navigation bar — yes/no-ish imo. safeAreaBar content is still rendered below the nav bar structurally, but they appear visually unified because they share the same scroll edge blur, seemingly powered internally by _UIScrollPocketInteraction (which is also private 😔). safeAreaBar seems able to coordinate with the navigation bar so both participate in the same edge-effect region, creating one seamless blur/material surface. UIScrollEdgeElementContainerInteraction, in my experience (unless I’m missing something), does not integrate into that same shared edge effect. Instead you effectively end up with two separate scroll-edge treatments/material regions.

Hi @SebJVidal , do you happen to know how the Photos app handles its tabs? How they can include the tabs in the toolbar? This creates a transparent, blurry background that also stretches to cover the tab area.

@luciascarlet It always infuriated me that you couldn’t add controls to the title bar like the office suite did. I seem to remember there being a package that add questionable support for this, but…

oh my god I forgot about this ABSOLUTE GEM from the same guidelines

That’s a good point, safeAreaBar gets you pretty close. It’s worth noting that it’s iOS 26 only and, unlike _UINavigationBarPalette, doesn’t actually add your content to the nav bar - just vertically below it. It’s also borked with large navigation titles, but that might not be a problem for your use case. If you want to stick to pure UIKit, you can use the UIScrollEdgeElementContainerInteraction for the same effect as safeAreaBar (albeit with the same limitations) #uiscrolledgeelementcontainerinteraction" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">sebvidal.com/blog/whats-new…

@JensVanSteen @SebJVidal Ah so it’s do-able with SwiftUI safeAreaBar. Thank you, will play around with it.

@khairilushan No problem :) All I will say is app review run static analysis on your binary, and check for known, blacklisted stings. So if those strings aren’t in your binary… 😉

@SebJVidal Aaah dang… Thank you tho. I knew I was asking the right person 😁