Let's take a look at sharing and actions, you can create the share extensions and action extensions that will work system wide within the other apps. That's how for example, you can access the Facebook share action from anywhere. So, share extensions provide a convenient way to share information from the current context with apps, social media accounts and other services. Action extensions. Let people initiate content specific tasks such as adding a bookmark, open a link or saving an image. People access share extensions and action extensions by typing an action button in an app to display an activity view.
An activity view shows only extensions relevant to the current context. You wouldn't see text manipulation actions while editing a video for example, within an activity view, share extensions at least it above action extensions Let's just take a look at how it usually works. User invokes the activity view, selects your activity, be their share activity or an action activity. That requested process happens in the model view. User performs any tweaks if needed. app shows the progress and also lets user knows the task was finished successfully.
That's it. If the user cancels the task, you might ask for confirmation. Now let's go over the guidelines. First, enable a single focus task. An extension isn't a mini app, it performs a narrowly scoped task related to the current context. craft a familiar interface for share extensions.
The system provided composition view is familiar and provides a consistent sharing experience throughout the system. Use it whenever possible. For action extensions include your app name, or design an interface that's recognizable, and feels like a natural extension of your app. streamline and limit interaction. The best extensions let people perform a task in just a few steps. For example, a share extension might immediately post an image to social media account with a single tap on the provided interface when necessary.
Avoid placing modal view above your extension. extensions are displayed within the modal view by default. While an alert might make sense above an extension, avoid layering Additional model views. Use your main app to denote the progress of lengthy operations, and activities you should dismiss immediately after initiating, sharing or inaction. time consuming tasks should continue in the background. And your main app should provide some way to check the status of these tasks.
Don't use notifications for this. People don't want to see any vacation every time a task completes. Although it's fine to notify them if there is a problem. That's what Apple tells us. As we have seen in the example, with Facebook sharing, you can just show the progress and completion right away. If the task is super long, though, and you would really run it in the background, I suppose you could notify about the completion via the toolbar.
Quantification would also be okay in this case, because you would want to know about the length the task completion, but you're unlikely to switch to the other app just to check it Use a template image for an action extension icon. A template image uses a mask to create an icon. Use black and white with appropriate transparency and anti aliasing and don't include the drop shadow. template images should be centered in an area measuring about 70 by 70 pixels. We discussed this more in the activity view lecture and the custom icons lecture.