A few years back I started an app that I was thinking of calling Christmas card tracker. The goal of the app was to learn Core Data. I spent time at WWDC working with a fellow attendee to fix problems I was having with Autolayout constraints, and got an early version working enough to where I could start capturing the cards my wife and I send out each year.

I then ran out of time and put it on the back burner. Along comes SwiftUI and I re-wrote the app from scratch, fixing a ton of problems, and along the way making it available for macOS, iPadOS and iOS, I even toyed with a watchOS version. It took me a few years of sporadic work, as I did a rewrite of my app Wasted Time, so that it could run on macOS and tvOS.

Well I am very close to releasing version 1.0, but have run into a very frustrating bug. When I go to add a new recipient of a card I give the user the option of searching their contacts list, or adding a new entry in the app. The Mac version of the screen can be seen here:

As you can see, their are three icons. The first is save, the second is search (your contacts) and the the third is close the entry without a save. The problem is, you don’t see a cursor in the first input field – “First Name”. You can use a mouse or the tab key to move the cursor into the field. You can type and tab between fields; however, on the iPad or iPhone, you cannot touch the screen to start entering in the field. You actually can’t enter the cursor into any fields, without a mouse or keyboard.

I am hoping to resolve this issue, but I’ve been banging my head for some time. I’ve tried posting on Stack Overflow, and all I got was a standard (you’ve posted too much code) statement. I posted in two different Swift developer community slacks. And so far I am still stuck. I’ve tried setting the first responder, and that didn’t work. My next idea will be to remove the Geometry Reader that I use to size the City, State, Zip entries.

Will post when I figure this out.