KeyboardKit 5.0 is out
KeyboardKit 5.0 is out! Let’s take a look at some of the changes in this new, major release.
Bye bye UIKit
KeyboardKit no longer contains any UIKit-specific functionality. Sure, there are still UIKit code around (lots of it), but views and functionality that was just there to get a UIKit-based keyboard to work have been removed.
Removing UIKit support has been a two year long process, where SwiftUI support has gone from being a plug-in to the core of the library. Focusing on SwiftUI will make it possible to move the library ahead much faster, resulting in a better library.
Styling
KeyboardKit 5 tweaks the appearance and style setup and makes it a lot easier to apply custom styles to basic views. As a result, the appearance engine now provide styles and all views and styles work in the same way, which makes it a lot easier to style keyboards.
Layout
KeyboardKit 5 itroduces a new KeyboardLayout type that makes it a lot easier to specify system keyboard properties like insets, heights etc. for different devices. This has made it possible to configure so that KeyboardKit-based keyboards look a lot more like the native keyboards than they did in previous versions.
Callouts
KeyboardKit 5 makes it easier to work with callouts, introducing new styles and features to help you customize how callouts are handled. Futhermore, the callout views look a lot more like the native callouts than they did in previous versions.
Type improvements
KeyboardKit 5 requires Swift 5.5, which lets the built-in types implement protocols like Codable and Identifiable with no additional code. As a result, more types implement these protocols than ever before.
View improvements
KeyboardKit 5 makes the built-in views take their dependencies as init parameters instead of fetching them as environment objects. This makes it much more obvious how a view must be created, reduces complexity and makes working with the views easier than before.
Also, there are new views that help you create more standalone views than ever before.
Breaking changes
KeyboardKit 5 comes with many breaking changes, but most of them should not affect you if you just use the system keyboard parts of the library. Migrating your existing projects to KeyboardKit 5 should therefore not require a lot of work.