iPad Default Look

[migueldeicaza]

The default look on the iPad hides the sidebar on portrait mode.

The story is that UISplitViewControllers have two capabilities that control the behavior: preferredSplitBehavior and preferredDisplayMode, documented on the UISplitViewController page

The problem is that these capabilities are not exposed in the automatic SwiftUI system that wires this up, as documented by Hacking with Swift.

The options seem to be:

• Rewrite the launcher app to use UIKit instead of SwiftUI, but would be giving up on a lot of wiring up and goodies
• Manually configure navigationTitle to provide some breadcrumbs to the user as to what they can do (currently, we just default to "Back", so we would need to change all nested items`)
• Use an idle loop hack to poke around values. The idle loop hack requires on hidden windows on the main surface area to display this. An example of this is in this post and in this StackOverflow answer

The hack can be made to work, but comes with assorted caveats, like need to take over the various policies, even for those where the defaults of SwiftUI are sensible.

[migueldeicaza]

The new landing page avoids the discoverability issues. Also the swift-introspect can be used to do this with SwiftUI if necessary in the future