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> Facebook, Instagram, Tweetbot etc. seem to have their own implementations because they want to hide the labels All one has to do, to hide the labels, is set
by zapzupnz 7y ago
> Facebook, Instagram, Tweetbot etc. seem to have their own implementations because they want to hide the labels
All one has to do, to hide the labels, is set the labels to "" and adjust the image insets to account for the empty space.
> Audible has one to show the album art in the middle item
That's possible with stock UITabBar. Just set the appropriate image for the UITabBarItem and, again, adjust the image insets.
> and only WhatsApp seems to use UITabBar as it was intended
That's surprising. I don't use WhatsApp anymore, but most of it seemed custom. Well, that scores WA one point, I guess.
> I don't think UIKit is that much better than e.g. Flutter in the way that AppKit is many times better than Electron
Until you want to use iOS' built-in accessibility features, and you are disappointed to see that third party apps needlessly reimplemented widgets and didn't do the extra work to make them accessible.
Sadly, accessibility is always seen as an optional extra, not a fundamental feature. It's been a fundamental feature of AppKit and UIKit since time immemorial.
When some of these apps make it to macOS via Project Catalyst, this issue might become exacerbated to some extent.
- gurkendoktor 7y agoYou can hide the labels in a stock UITabBar, but you can't change its size, and I suspect this is what motivated Facebook and others to hide the labels in the first place. You are right about the Audible use case, it might actually be using using a stock UITabBar. And in my experience WhatsApp has always been a pretty good platform citizen. It's one the very few icons on my home screen that tries to match Apple's style. Agreed about a11y, I'm glad that Apple keeps bringing it up as a core feature.