iOS What kind of tech stack you will choose for a complex UICollectionView requirement?

[yccheok]

Hi all,

We do have the following complex layout requirement, when porting an Android app to iOS app

• Compact list view - https://i.imgur.com/0VnEUB7.png
• List view - https://i.imgur.com/tg2vlgC.png
• Compact grid view - https://i.imgur.com/geIJ40g.png
• Grid view - https://i.imgur.com/n5pdX6J.png
• Flexible view - https://i.imgur.com/z1PHUCr.png

Also, we need to support

• Animation during add, delete, modify.
• Drag-n-move
• Support multiple headers (Pinned, Others, ...) - https://i.imgur.com/Woix6yi.png

We are planning to use UICollectionView as our base, coupled with external library stack to make things easier. However, we're not sure which stack is good for us.

1. UICollectionView + https://github.com/jflinter/Dwifft(We are able to utilise it to better achieve animation during add, delete, modify)
2. UICollectionView + https://github.com/onmyway133/DeepDiff(We are able to utilise it to better achieve animation during add, delete, modify)
3. UICollectionView + https://github.com/Instagram/IGListKit(We are able to achieve much more than the above 2. But, we're going to lock into a vendor's (Instagram) framework)
4. ???

Have you tried any above tech stack? What is your opinion on them? If you were in our use case requirement, which tech stack you will go for?

Thanks

 

[Mascots]

I have some experience with IGListKit and can recommend it for the various problems it solves, mainly the differentiation functionality which has been, up until SwiftUI's introduction, sorely missing from UIKit. It's a larger component than the other two (it looks like) so you'd have to code around its methodology rather than working a diffing framework into existing or traditional methods.

Since it is now open source and extremely popular framework I'm sure you can rid yourself of any fears of vendor lock-in, too.

 

[DaveBerry]

I would be using a collection view for the main table with different layout providers for each view mode.