UILint

The goal of this project is to ease the burden of making high quality user interfaces just so both for developers and designers. Similar to a linter that monitors code for issues, UILint examines a UI at runtime to find potential issues.

The MVP of UILInt will examine a UIKIt, SwiftUI, or hybrid scene, check for several high-yield potential UI issues, and be able to report these findings to the user through a PDF shared from the device.

🚨 Early Alpha 🚨 you've been warned

Please don't use this for real yet, but if you're interested in using it, consider contributing.

Installation

UILint is a Swift Package that can be added directly to a project in XCode by clicking

File -> Swift Packages -> Add Package Dependency

and pasting this repository's url in the resulting search text field and clicking Next. On the next screen, select the version desired. Until there is a release, selecting the master branch is the simplest choice. Click Next and check that the default Add to Target setting makes sense. Click Finish and you're on your way to a lint-free UI!

Usage

UILint usage is likely to change dramatically, but to get a feel right now, just import UILint in a UIViewController subclass of interest, and in the viewDidLoad function, add the line:

let lint = UILintSession(view: view)

When the view loads, text representing the views in the scene will appear unceremoniously in the console. A PDF report can be generated and written to a file with

let pdfData = lint.makePDF()
try? pdfData.write(to: URL(fileURLWithPath: "/tmp/test.pdf"))

Experimental behavior: Register UILint with your application to enable a gesture to create a UILint PDF report of the current scene and share with a share sheet. Add import UILint to the SceneDelegate.swift, then add the following to the function scene(_:willConnectTo:options:), then a two-touch double-tap will perform the linting. To perform this in the simulator, press Option while mousing over the simulator and click twice.

UILint.register(window: window)

And deregester UILint with this line in sceneDidDisconnect(_:)

UILint.deregister()

For apps supporting iOS 12 and earlier, add these lines to the project's AppDelegate functions application(_:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:) and applicationWillTerminate().

A demo UIKit app is available in the TestApps/ directory. It has been integrated with UILint and has these calls in place.