Adding a segmented control for tip percentages

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    October 8th 2023

Now we’re going to add a second picker view to our app, but this time we want something slightly different: we want a segmented control. This is a specialized kind of picker that shows a handful of options in a horizontal list, and it works great when you have only a small selection to choose from.

Our form already has two sections: one for the amount and number of people, and one where we’ll show the final result – it’s just showing checkAmount for now, but we’re going to fix it soon.

In the middle of those two sections I’d like you to add a third to show tip percentages:

Section {
    Picker("Tip percentage", selection: $tipPercentage) {
        ForEach(tipPercentages, id: \.self) {
            Text($0, format: .percent)
        }
    }
}

That loops over all the options in our tipPercentages array, converting each one into a text view with the .percent format. Just like the previous picker, SwiftUI will convert that to a single row in our list, and present a pop-up menu of options when it’s tapped.

Here, though, I want to show you how to use a segmented control instead, because it looks much better. So, please add this modifier to the tip picker:

.pickerStyle(.segmented)

That should go at the end of the picker’s closing brace, like this:

Section {
    Picker("Tip percentage", selection: $tipPercentage) {
        ForEach(tipPercentages, id: \.self) {
            Text($0, format: .percent)
        }
    }
    .pickerStyle(.segmented)
}

If you run the program now you’ll see things are starting to come together: users can now enter the amount on their check, select the number of people, and select how much tip they want to leave – not bad!

But things aren’t quite what you think. One problem app developers face is that we take for granted that our app does what we intended it to do – we designed it to solve a particular problem, so we automatically know what everything means.

Try to look at our user interface with fresh eyes, if you can:

• “Amount” makes sense – it’s a box users can type a number into.
• “Number of people” is also pretty self-explanatory.
• The label at the bottom is where we’ll show the total, so right now we can ignore that.
• That middle section, though – what are those percentages for?

Yes, we know they are to select how much tip to leave, but that isn’t obvious on the screen. We can – and should do better.

One option is to add another text view directly before the segmented control, which we could do like this:

Section {
    Text("How much tip do you want to leave?")

    Picker("Tip percentage", selection: $tipPercentage) {
        ForEach(tipPercentages, id: \.self) {
            Text($0, format: .percent)
        }
    }
    .pickerStyle(.segmented)
}

That works OK, but it doesn’t look great – it looks like it’s an item all by itself, rather than a label for the segmented control.

A much better idea is to modify the section itself: SwiftUI lets us add views to the header and footer of a section, which in this instance we can use to add a small explanatory prompt. In fact, we can use the same text we just created, just moved to be the section header rather than a loose label inside it.

Here’s how that looks in code:

Section("How much tip do you want to leave?") {
    Picker("Tip percentage", selection: $tipPercentage) {
        ForEach(tipPercentages, id: \.self) {
            Text($0, format: .percent)
        }
    }
    .pickerStyle(.segmented)
}

It’s a small change to the code, but I think the end result looks a lot better – the text now looks like a prompt for the segmented control directly below it.

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