I know I said that I wasn’t planning on any major updates to Beer Style Guidelines. But here I am, releasing a major update to the app.

This is the first release since last August.

But this release is only for iOS and iPadOS. The current macOS version is still v2023.4. I am planning to make updates to the macOS version soon™.

What’s New?

The entire user interface has been rewritten. Previously, I was using UIKit for most of the UI. I had a smattering of SwiftUI. Now, it’s basically reversed. It’s mostly SwiftUI with a smattering of UIKit.

I started with a SwiftUI-only implementation. UIKit made a reappearance in a few places when I struggled for too long getting things working correctly.

One example is the pageable detail view. I fought with SwiftUI’s TabView (doc) with the .tabViewStyle(.page(...)) modifier for too long. I just couldn’t get it to behave like I was expecting. I finally gave up and went with a UIPageViewController (doc) and never looked back.

I also struggled getting my keyboard shortcuts working with SwiftUI’s ScrollView (doc). I have keyboard shortcuts to scroll to the top/bottom, up/down a few lines, up/down a page. With a ScrollView, you can scroll to items (with an id), but what I have is one large scrollable View without an id. I couldn’t figure out how to scroll to a specific location without an id. I know how to do this with a UIScrollView (doc). I wrapped the nested SwiftUI content in the UIScrollView and used the keyboard shortcuts the way I knew how.

I’m not saying these two issues are impossible to solve in SwiftUI. I was just getting frustrated with them and it was easier for me to drop back into UIKit to solve the issue. I hope to find a SwiftUI solution to these soon.

New Text Rendering Engine

Internally, the style guidelines use Markdown for the storing the guide contents. When a guide section is selected, the markdown is loaded and rendered for the user.

Previously, I was using Down as the markdown engine. It was working well enough, but I wanted something that processed tables more naturally. With Down, I could use HTML, but I wanted to use the GitHub table syntax.

I found MarkdownUI. That library allows for both markdown tables and parses directly to SwiftUI. So far it’s been really nice to work with.

Bug Fixes

I believe I’ve fixed a few bugs that existed in the old app. I probably introduced a number of new bugs with this update. I’ve made a lot of changes within the app and I’m sure there are bugs somewhere.

What’s Next?

I’ll probably take a short break from the app. I’ve been pretty focused on this for the last few months. I need a little break.

I am going to start working on an updated macOS version in the next week or two. A lot of it already works on macOS. Everything compiles and runs, but not all of the features are available on macOS. But I need to deal with some of the iOS-specific code I put in place.

The yearly version of the Brewers Association Style Guide usually come out around now. When it does come out, I’ll be busy getting that into the app.