MacKuba

🍎 Kuba Suder's blog on Mac & iOS development

WWDC 19

Architecting Your App for Multiple Windows

Categories: UIKit 0 comments Watch the video

App delegate should still handle things like initializing/cleaning up the whole process

It should not however handle things like setting up the UI or updating it when the app goes into foreground/background – because this will now happen separately per session

Additionally, application delegate is now notified when a scene is created or discarded

Lifecycle delegate methods like willEnterForeground, didBecomeActive etc. will not be called at all if scene lifecycle is enabled

Modern lifecycle flow:

Starting the app:

  • AppDelegate: didFinishLaunching
  • AppDelegate: _:configurationForConnecting:options: -> UISceneConfiguration – configuration for the scene
  • SceneDelegate: _:willConnectTo:options: – this is where you set up your new scene

Scene configuration (UISceneConfiguration): an object that describes the delegate class, storyboard etc. It's either built dynamically, or (better) statically described in Info.plist and looked up by name using the constructor:

UISceneConfiguration(name: "Default", sessionRole: session.role)

Going to the background:

  • SceneDelegate: willResignActive
  • SceneDelegate: didEnterBackground
  • SceneDelegate: sceneDidDisconnect – after some time, the system will release your scene (including the delegate object and all views and VCs) to save memory; you should now release any objects loaded to build that piece of UI

When the user force-closes a scene:

  • AppDelegate: _:didDiscardSceneSessions: (may be called on the next launch instead)

“State restoration is no longer a nicety”

Watch out for cases where a view controller needs to be updated if there are multiple scenes presenting the same view, which you might not have taken into account before – it’s better to only update the model and observe changes in the model, instead of updating the view directly when the user adds some new content

  • pro tip: you can pass Swift-only objects like enums in NSNotification if you use them as the sending object instead of in userInfo


Leave a comment

*

*
This will only be used to display your Gravatar image.

*

What's the name of the base class of all AppKit and UIKit classes?

*