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New to macOS Development. How Do I Build a Timeline Editor UI Like Logic Pro?
Hi everyone, I’m new to macOS development and working on an app idea that needs a timeline-based editor interface, similar to what you see in Logic Pro or Final Cut. The UI I want to build would have: A horizontal beat ruler that follows BPM and shows beat positions Several vertical tracks stacked below it (for things like events or markers) Horizontal zooming and scrolling A preview panel on the right side that stays in sync with the timeline I’m currently trying this in SwiftUI, but I’m running into some limitations and wondering if AppKit would be a better fit, or maybe a hybrid of the two. My questions: Where should I start when building something like this? What’s the best way to make the beat ruler and all track layers scroll together? How should I handle zooming in/out and syncing the display to a BPM timeline? Is there a clean way to integrate AppKit for the timeline view while keeping SwiftUI elsewhere?
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Jun ’25
Images added in Reality Composer look darker in AR
I’m working with Reality Composer and noticed that images added directly to a scene appear significantly darker when viewed in AR. This seems different from how other objects in the scene respond to lighting, especially under varying real-world light conditions. Is this expected behavior? Are images treated with a different lighting model in Reality Composer? Is there any recommended way to get more consistent light response for image-based artworks?
Topic: Design SubTopic: General Tags:
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NavigationTitle in LiquidGlass style
Hello everyone. I want to do navigationTitle (located on the top side on MacOS system) in LiquidGlass style. now my solution look like: just black rectangle. But i want like this: opacity and LiquidGlass. Like in Photo app in MacOS. Please help me, thank you in advance. My code: struct RootView: View { @Environment(\.horizontalSizeClass) var hSize var body: some View { if hSize == .regular { DesktopLayout() .navigationTitle("title") .toolbarBackground(.ultraThinMaterial, for: .automatic) } else { MobileLayout() } } }
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tvOS alternative app icons
Does anyone know if alternate app icons are actually supposed to work for Apple TV projects? We tried to set this up, and while it works in Debug, we run into validation errors when uploading the app to App Store Connect. Is this feature officially supported on tvOS, or is it iOS-only?
Topic: Design SubTopic: General
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NFC innovation
Existing smartphones store multiple NFC card information. When the NFC antenna of the phone is close to the card reader, it is usually necessary to open the APP to select NFC card information or default to one card information to be transmitted to the card reader. It is not possible to quickly select or switch cards among multiple cards. For example, after using the NFC function to swipe the subway card, the phone needs to open the car access control and community access control again. It is necessary to open the mobile NFC card information management APP to select the community access control card and then swipe the mobile NFC access control, which causes inconvenience. (现有的智能手机存储多个 NFC 卡信息。当手机的NFC天线靠近读卡器时,通常需要打开APP选择NFC卡信息或默认一个卡信息传输到读卡器。无法在多张卡之间快速选择或切换卡。例如,使用NFC功能刷完地铁卡后,手机需要重新打开车内门禁和小区门禁。需要打开手机NFC卡信息管理APP选择社区门禁卡,然后刷手机NFC门禁,造成不便。) Divide the smartphone screen into multiple areas, and users can freely define corresponding NFC information for each area. When the screen is turned off and not unlocked, select NFC card information by pressing different screen areas with your fingers. When the mobile NFC is close to the card reader, the selected card information will be transmitted to the reader(将智能手机屏幕划分多个区域,每个区域手机用户可以自由定义对应NFC信息。在熄屏’不解锁的情况下,通过手指按压不同屏幕区域选择NFC卡片信息,手机NFC贴近读卡器时将选择的卡片信息传递给读卡器。) Below, the method will be further explained in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and embodiments. Figure 1 is a schematic diagram of a utility model; Figure 2 is the flowchart of the present utility model; NFC reader, 2. Mobile screen partition, 3. NFC signal in Figure 1. In Figure 2, 1. Press the area of the screen partition with your finger. 2. Place the phone close to the NFC reader. 3. The phone senses the returned NFC signal. 4. The phone detects the pressed area.( 下面结合附图和实施例对方法进一步说明。 图1为实用新型示意图; 图2为本实用新型流程图; 图1中1.NFC读取器,2.手机屏幕分区,3.NFC信号。 图2中1.手指按压屏幕分区的区域2.手机贴近NFC读取器3.手机感应到返回的NFC信号4.手机检测到按压的区域,5.是否检测到手机用户按压区域的动作,6.检测到按压区域,根据按压区域做出匹配相对应的NFC的动作7.选择用户所需的NFC卡8.NFC卡收到信息并发出卡片信息9.NFC读卡器收到NFC卡的信息。) For example, a smartphone user has N NFC virtual cards in their phone. Users can divide the smartphone screen into N areas, distinguished as A area, B area, C area..., each area controls different NFC. When a smartphone user holds down the B area that controls NFC (such as virtual access cards) and brings the phone close to the NFC card reader (such as access control). The mobile phone will sense NFC signals (access control signals), triggering the phone to detect the area that the user is pressing. There are two possibilities. Firstly, if the user's pressing action is not detected, the NFC card corresponding to the default A zone (set as the default here) will be selected. If the user's pressing action is detected and it is detected that the pressing is in Zone B (the partition corresponding to the access card), then the NFC information corresponding to Zone B is triggered. The smartphone receives this message, and the corresponding NFC sends out a card message. The NFC card reader (access control device) receives the message and reacts (door opens).(例如,一智能手机用户手机中有N个NFC虚拟卡。用户可以将智能手机屏幕分为N个区域,分辨为A区、B区、C区······,每个区域分别控制不同的NFC。当智能手机用户按住控制NFC(如虚拟门禁卡)的B区域并将手机靠近NFC读卡器(如门禁)。手机将会感应到NFC信号(门禁信号),触发手机检测用户正在按压的区域。有两种可能性,第一没有检测到用户的按压动作则选择默认的A区(这里把A区设为默认)所对应的NFC卡。第二检测到用户的按压动作并检测出按压的是B区域(门禁卡所对应的分区),则触发B区域所对应的NFC信息。智能手机收到此信息,相对应的NFC发出卡片信息,NFC读卡器(门禁设备)收到信息,做出反应(门打开)。) 图1 image1 图2 image2
Topic: Design SubTopic: General
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Sep ’25
Always use new animation in Stage Manager, why not?
The brand new animation in Stage Manager greatly reduced dizziness. However, don’t know why it ONLY applies when no window was presented. What would be the problem elsewhere? Stage Manager is one of pretty few motion pictures that annoyed me and forced me to turn on Reduce Motion, or stop using Stage Manager. Big pity… macOS 26.0 (25A5346a) wont use ipad to post…
Topic: Design SubTopic: General
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Sep ’25
Future iPhone Innovations – Portless & Foldable iPhones
Dear Apple Innovation Team, I have a game-changing iPhone concept and want Apple to explore it first. 📱 iPhone 18 – The First True Portless iPhone No ports – MagSafe 2.0 with high-speed data transfer. Under-display Face ID & Camera – No security compromise. Seamless OLED Display – No interruptions, just pure screen. 📂 iPhone 20 – The Perfect Foldable Crease-free foldable design – Apple perfects what others failed to. Optimized iOS for foldables – Smooth UI & app integration. Apple leads the foldable market. 🚀 Why This Matters: Apple can set a new standard & dominate both innovations. Looking forward to your response. Best, Saksham Sethi
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Mar ’25
UITabBarController with sidebar on iPadOS 18
When I create a tab group for the sidebar on iPad, the title and disclosure triangle act like a single control. Every time I tap the section title, the disclosure triangle for that section activates and hides or exposes that section's children and actions. I want the section title to behave like Photos, where tapping a section title just displays its view controller, and the disclosure triangle is a separate control that must be tapped to hide and show children and actions. I did not see any delegate methods that would let me control this behavior. Is this supported?
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May ’25
A Summary of the WWDC25 Group Lab - Design
At WWDC25 we launched a new type of Lab event for the developer community - Group Labs. A Group Lab is a panel Q&A designed for a large audience of developers. Group Labs are a unique opportunity for the community to submit questions directly to a panel of Apple engineers and designers. Here are the highlights from the WWDC25 Group Lab for Design. Can you expand on how Liquid Glass helps with navigation and focus in the UI? Liquid Glass clarifies the navigation layer by introducing a single, floating pane that acts as the primary navigation area. Buttons within this pane seamlessly morph as you move between sections, and controls can temporarily lift into the glass surface. While avoiding excessive use of glass (like layering glass on glass), this approach simplifies navigation and strengthens the connection between menus, alerts, and the elements that trigger them. What should I do with customized bars that I might have in my app? Reconsider the content and behavior of customized bars. Evaluate whether you need all the buttons and whether a menu might be a better solution. Instead of relying on background colors or styling, express hierarchy through layout and grouping. This is a good opportunity to adopt the new design language and simplify your interface. What are scroll edge effects, and what options do we have for them? Scroll edge effects enhance legibility in controls by lifting interactive elements and separating them from the background. There are two types: a soft edge effect (a subtle blur) and a hard edge effect (a more defined boundary for high-legibility areas like column sorting). Scroll edge effects are designed to work seamlessly with Liquid Glass, allowing content to feel expansive while ensuring controls and titles remain legible. How can we ensure or improve accessibility using Liquid Glass? Legibility is a priority, and refinements are ongoing throughout the betas. Liquid Glass adapts well to accessibility settings like Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, and Reduce Motion. There are two variants of glass: regular glass, designed to be legible by default, and clear glass, used in places like AVKit, which requires more care to ensure legibility. Use color contrast tools to ensure contrast ratios are met. The Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are a living document offering best practices. The colors and materials pages are key resources. Do you have any recommendations for convincing designers concerned with consistency across Android and Web to use Liquid Glass? Start small and focus on high-utility controls that don't significantly impact brand experience. Native controls offer familiarity and predictability to users. Using the native controls makes sure your app feels at home on the device. Using native frameworks provides built-in accessibility support (dynamic type, reduce transparency, increase contrast). Native controls come with built-in behaviors and interactions. Can ScrollViews include Liquid Glass within them? You can technically put a glass layer inside a scroll view, but it can feel heavy and doesn't align with the system's intention for Liquid Glass to serve as a fixed layer. Think of the content layer as the scrolling layer, and the navigational layer as the one using Liquid Glass. If there is glass on the content layer it will collide into the navigational layer. What core design philosophy guided the direction of iOS 26, beyond the goal of unification? The core design philosophy involved blurring the line between hardware and software, separating UI and navigation elements from content, making apps adaptable across window sizes, and combining playfulness with sophistication. It was about making the UI feel at home on rounded screens. Can we layer Liquid Glass elements on top of each other? Avoid layering Liquid Glass elements directly on top of each other, as it creates unnecessary visual complexity. The system will automatically convert nested glass elements to a vibrant fill style. Use vibrant fills and labels to show control shapes and ensure legibility. Opaque grays should be avoided in favor of vibrant colors, which will multiply with the backgrounds correctly. What will happen to apps that use custom components? Should they be adapted to the new design within the next year? The more native components you use, the more things happen for free. Standard components will be upgraded automatically. Look out for any customizations that might clash. Think about what is the minimum viable change, where your app still feels and looks very similar to what it did. Prioritize changes in core workflows and navigational areas. There are a number of benefits to using native components including user familiarity, built-in accessibility support, and built-in behaviors and interactions. Will Apple be releasing Figma design templates? Sketch kits were published on Monday and can be referenced. The goal is to ensure the resources are well-organized, well-named, and easy to use. It's a high priority.
Topic: Design SubTopic: General
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Jun ’25
Design Challenges with persistent toast message
I have an ongoing activity in progress. Think of: a delivery in progress house internet reboot in progress some water / electricity / internet / tv outage. (food) order processing I want to show a persistent toast message above the tab bar, across all tabs and screens across the app. It could take 15 minutes until the activity is finished. Obviously there's a challenge of: accessibility content overlaying with each other extra engineering effort. What we've thought of doing is: Option1: show a toast message, but when a modal is presented then it presents on top of the toast message. The toast message no longer updates itself. Once the modal is finished, then the toast message re-appears and continues to update. Option2: keep the toast message across all tabs and modals and work through the challenges mentioned Question: What are some other design approaches that could be taken to persist an ongoing activity (much like 'Live Activity', but just across the app when it's in foreground) or what are some design reasons that the two options considered are bad?
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May ’25
New IOS APP Help
Hello, I am looking to develop a relationship with a developer that has experience running through the IOS build approval process. To elaborate, my team and I have designed and built a software application which is working through the Apple Developer review process to have the app approved and released to the App Store. Unfortunately, there has been some challenges, simple challenges in my eyes with our interface preventing Apple from approving our application. Happy to elaborate further. A primary problem and solution I have seen is the software build was testing solely on the iPhone but as recently directed it seem the application must be accessible on iPad as well. With this the case, I have experience some software platforms where on the ipad the interface is not displayed on the whole screen. I am looking for direction on how to implement this setup for the 1st IOS build. Another concern from Apples Developer Review team is the App Tracking Transparency kit may need to be implemented.
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Sep ’25
Animating items between a VStack and a ZStack?
Hey there! I'd love to know if theres a way where you can animate items between ZStack and VStacks? Just like the native iOS notifications on the Lockscreen stack at the bottom and if tapped, they convert from a Stack to a List - I have a list with items, displayed in a VStack, and I make the list collapsable when swiping down, where the items stack behind eachother with a progresisve reduction in opacity & scale, but I havent figured out a way to animate the items between the list and the stack - where you can visually see items starting to overlap and stack ontop of eachother when collapsing the list.
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May ’25
Liquid Glass icons appear differently in Dock
I just played around on macOS with the new icons created by Icon Composer, and I noticed that the Dock displays programmatically set icons differently. Try this: Make sure you have the Mail app in your Dock. Set the icon appearance to "Tinted/Light" and set a dark (black) background for the Desktop. Run this code: let image = NSWorkspace.shared.icon(forFile: "/System/Applications/Mail.app") if image.isValid { NSApp.applicationIconImage = image } You'll get something like this: When the icon appearance is set to "Default" or "Dark," everything works as expected, and the "Clear/Dark" and "Tinted/Dark" modes seem to work as well. It seems like the Dock uses a special blend mode depending on the selected background, but this does not seem to be the case if the icon is set programmatically. I filed feedback FB20291186.
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Sep ’25
How to make web shortcut icons mode-adaptive like native app icons?
Hello everyone, I'm very impressed with the Liquid Glass design introduced in iOS 26, especially how native app icons automatically adapt to the system's display mode (dark or light). This brings me to a question: Is it possible to make a website shortcut icon created via Safari's "Add to Home Screen" feature adapt to Dark Mode in the same way? For native apps, we can use tools like Icon Composer and asset catalogs (Assets.xcassets) to provide different icons for each mode. It would be a huge improvement for web clips if we could achieve the same with existing web technologies like apple-touch-icon or the Web App Manifest. If anyone has figured out a way to do this, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share your knowledge. Thanks in advance! 日本語の原文: iOS 26から導入されたLiquid Glassデザインについて。 ネイティブアプリのアイコンがシステムの表示モード(ダークモード/ライトモード)に合わせて自動で最適化されるようになりました。 そこで疑問に思ったのですが、Safariから「ホーム画面に追加」機能を使って作成するWebサイトのショートカットアイコンは、ネイティブアプリと同じようにダークモードに対応できないのでしょうか? ネイティブアプリの場合は、Icon Composerなどのツールでアセットカタログ(Assets.xcassets)を使い、モードごとのアイコンを用意できますよね。 Web側でも、apple-touch-iconやWeb App Manifestといった既存の仕組みを使って、アイコンを動的に切り替えられるようになると、Webクリップの使い勝手がさらに向上すると思うのですが もし、すでに何らかの方法で対応されている方がいらっしゃれば、ぜひその知見を共有していただけると嬉しいです。
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625
Sep ’25