🥸 Using UIKit's New UITab Class with Sidebar on iOS 18 👌

Welcome to issue #35 of the iOS Coffee Break Newsletter 📬.

Last week, I implemented a sample application of the newsletter to showcase how you can use iOS 18's new TabView with a sidebar in SwiftUI.

This week, I plan to rewrite last week's application using UIKit, demonstrating how to implement the same functionality for those still working with UIKit in their projects.

Let's see how to get it done!

UIKit Integration

In UIKit, managing and customizing tabs is simple:

• UITabBarController: Use the tabs property with UITab options like UISearchTab.
• Adjusting modes: Set UITabBarController.Mode.tabBar for a standard tab bar or configure it for a sidebar layout.
• SwiftUI equivalents: Convert TabSections into UITabGroup, and use sidebarActions(content:) instead of sectionActions.
• Drag and drop support: Implement UITabBarControllerDelegate to handle drag-and-drop interactions effectively.

Setting Up the Tabs

We need to create a UITabBarController and assign an array of UITab options like UISearchTab objects to its tabs property. To add a search tab, we just need to create a UISearchTab instance and add it to the tabs array.

class AppViewController: UITabBarController {
 
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
 
        // Assign an array of tabs.
        self.tabs = [
            UITab(
                title: "Issues",
                image: UIImage(systemName: "book"),
                identifier: "issues"
            ) { _ in
                 // Return the view controller that the tab displays.
                 UIHostingController(rootView: IssuesView())
            },
            UITab(
                title: "About",
                image: UIImage(systemName: "person"),
                identifier: "about"
            ) { _ in
                 // Return the view controller that the tab displays.
                UIHostingController(rootView: AboutView())
            },
            // Create a search tab.
            UISearchTab { _ in
                UIHostingController(rootView: SearchArticlesView())
            }
        ]
    }
}
 

Integrate the Tab bar and Sidebar

To enable users to switch between a traditional tab bar and a sidebar, we can control how the system presents your tabs by configuring the mode property of the UITabBarController object.

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
 
    [...]
 
    // Enable the sidebar.
    self.mode = .tabSidebar
}

By default, the system presents the sidebar in landscape orientation and hides it in portrait orientation, however, you can toggle between the tab bar and sidebar in either orientation. You can also programmatically show and hide the sidebar by setting its isHidden property.

Here is the final result:

iOS Coffee Break Newsletter UIKit sample app.

To explore the full implementation of the sample application, visit the repository on GitHub.

The improvements to tabs and sidebars in iPadOS and other Apple platforms provide greater flexibility and usability for app development. Whether you are working with SwiftUI or UIKit, I am sure these updates simplify the process of building seamless, intuitive user interfaces!

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In fact, at work, we recently migrated a monolithic codebase to a modularized solution with Swift Packages, which significantly improved our build and compilation times, so I could not recommend it more!

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