{"id":27232,"date":"2019-11-07T13:58:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T18:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=27232"},"modified":"2019-11-07T13:58:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-07T18:58:00","slug":"twitterrific-ios-windows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/07\/twitterrific-ios-windows\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitterrific iOS Windows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Christoffel<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Twitterrific<\/a> has become the first Twitter client to add multiwindow support, enabling creating separate windows for different accounts or different views within the same account. The first-party Twitter<\/a> app, meanwhile, has recently added extensive support for external keyboards, likely as a side benefit of the app making its way to the Mac<\/a>. In both cases, the Twitter experience on iPad has been meaningfully improved in ways that power users will appreciate.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

If you have more than one Twitter account, such as one for personal use and another for business, multiwindow is a compelling way to avoid needing to switch back and forth between them constantly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Craig Hockenberry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

This review that covers a both a third-party and first-party Twitter app shows how important the former is.<\/p>\n

Third parties are always<\/em> first with platform features like multi-window on iPad. And we’ve had keyboard support for several years.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Sean Heber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I did quite a lot of work to retain support for iOS 12 while adding iOS 13 multi-windowing, but it’s kind of looking like we probably could have just dropped iOS 12 and saved myself a lot of effort. 😛<\/p>\n

A particularly nasty implementation detail when adding multi-window to Twitterrific was that our previous theming system assumed a single global setting. When you send a window to the background on iOS 13, it snapshots it for the app picker a bunch of times.<\/p>\n

While it’s taking snapshots for the app picker, it changes the appearance mode for that window<\/em> between light\/dark so it has snapshots ready if your system appearance changes. This caused the whole app to flicker between light\/dark whenever any window was being snapshotted.<\/p>\n

I had to pull a LOT of stuff apart and rebuild it just to get this all to work per-window so any other visible windows you might have had open didn’t flicker between light and dark.<\/p>\n

Another wrinkle here is that we allow custom themes to be loaded from iCloud Drive - but you can’t rely on a file in iCloud Drive to be immediately available (it might have to be downloaded first, for example).<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

There are just countless little things like this to consider when implementing something as fundamentally disruptive as adding multi-window. People have no idea.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n