20 Jan 2015

Frustration

When Mac and iOS developers get together, we complain about Apple bugs — which will always be true, whether or not the number and severity of bugs is actually high.

If we can’t grumble, we can’t be happy. So we grumble.

If you and I were sitting at a table, here’s the story I’d tell you:

WebView has a bug where scrolling is messed-up in some cases where you have a div that needs to stay anchored to one side of the window. (Think of a header that doesn’t move while the rest of the content moves.)

But the new replacement for WebView — WKWebView — doesn’t have this bug. Which is great. Let’s adopt the new thing! I’m all in. Love new things.

So I did, and it’s great. So happy. Until I noticed the console message:

Could not create a sandbox extension for '/'

I did some research, and I learned that WKWebView won’t show local content — that is, files that are loaded from the app’s bundle. Files from the app bundle ought to be a-okay, ought not be a sandbox violation, but apparently they are.

So while this works fine in my development build, research tells me it won’t work for the release build.

Do I need to write and embed a small web server in the app just to make this work? (Na ga da.) Instead, let’s just put the files on the web, because of course the web is safer than files distributed in the app bundle. (That right there was sarcasm.) It means the feature won’t work when off-line, but there are mitigating factors that make that mostly okay. Okay enough.

So: great. Problem solved!

Until, that is, I went to wire up the Find command. WebView has a searchFor:direction:caseSensitive:wrap:. It’s not as great as the Find feature in Safari, but it’s okay for what I’m trying to do. (At least for now.)

WKWebView has nothing even similar. So now I don’t know what to do.

In an ideal world, WKWebView would work with files from the app bundle, and, as a replacement for WebView, it would have the same functionality as WebView (a searchFor or equivalent method). Anything else means running as fast as I can while I slip backwards.