The new UITabBarController APIs are great! But they leave a lot to be desired.
For example, let's say I want a bottom accessory – one simple enough that it could be a UIBarButtonItem. The UITabAccessoryAPI only takes UIViews but passing a simple UIVIew or UIButton will create a new problem: now the view is stretched to be huge instead of a tiny little image-button.
New approach: Show it on screen as a contextual overlay modal thing. I can do that, no problem. New problem: It won't animate down when the tab bar minimizes, like the bottom accessory does; there is no layout guide exposed that allows us to hook into this. I'd really rather not reverse engineer to grab the platter when the state is minimized and set some funky layout constraints to adapt to it, determine that it can fit (a bit irrelevant in this instance, since it's a single button), and animate into place as the tab bar animates.
I know there's a new contentLayoutGuide, but it doesn't seem there's anything like what I'm looking for here. I basically just want a tab accessory view, but I don't want to commit to it being so huge. And what happens if I want multiple views here?
Suddenly, this opens up the toolbar, but… having a toolbar and a tab bar in the same app is an exercise in frustration, since the tab bar will cover up the toolbar.
In a different environment, I may have gone ahead and just wrapped my own UITabBar, as Steve Troughton-Smith does via his Mastodon post (can't link directly). That presents another host of issues though:
- iPad behavior goes out the window.
- I'd probably still have to dig into private APIs to get a magic pocket effect that works the same as the
UITabBarController's!UIScrollEdgeElementContainerInteractiondoesn't behave exactly the same as the interaction added to the tab bar by the tab bar controller.
Is there any such API for this? What possible reason could there be for keeping these APIs private?