DuvetAn open source framework for displaying partial sheet views within iOS.
Why we built it.
As iPhone screens have become taller and content areas near the top of the screen have become harder to reach with a single hand, the use of bottom sheets as a design pattern has trended up. Popularized within the Apple Maps and Apple Shortcuts apps, along with many third-party apps, bottom sheets allow for the display of content that may not fill the entire screen while preserving the context of the underlying view that presented the overlaid sheet. Sheet views can easily be collapsed or dismissed by swiping down on the view instead of having to reach for navigation buttons at the top of view.
In lieu of a built-in, out-of-the-box native solution for this pattern from Apple, the iOS team at Livefront set out to build a reusable framework that integrates with established navigation patterns in iOS and also provides an easy way to add sheet views to an app. The goal of the framework is to support creation of sheet views from existing view controllers with minimal changes in the view itself. Our open source library, Duvet, supports different configurations for displaying fully open sheets, half open sheets, or sheets that expand to fit the size of the content in the containing view controller. All of the complexity of managing gesture recognizers, displaying different sized sheets, and accommodating scrolling are handled for you.
How does it work?
The SheetViewController
is a container view controller that manages one or more child view controllers. The configuration for how a sheet is displayed and the positions it supports can be customized with a SheetConfiguration
object. An existing UIViewController
can be displayed as a sheet by creating a SheetItem
which wraps the UIViewController
with its SheetConfiguration
. The SheetItem
then can be used to instantiate a SheetViewController
or pushed onto an existing SheetViewController
How do I use it?
Using Duvet is very similar to other container view controller patterns in iOS. The API is modeled after UINavigationController
so that a single root sheet can be presented within a SheetViewController
and additional sheets can be pushed onto and popped off the navigation stack.
Check out the project on GitHub for more details.
We are Livefront.
Our team creates beautiful mobile apps for people in motion. We work every day with Fortune 500 companies and startups alike to build custom software for phones, tablets, mobile payment wallets, and wearables like watches and glasses. We care deeply about quality, and we love what we do.