Whenever I want to display some overlay on top of everything else, I just add it on top of the Application Window directly: [[[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow] addSubview:someView]
Yes, adding it to the UIWindow would be extremely hacky and finicky. Storyboards If you’re using Storyboards and iOS 5.0 onwards, you should be able to use container views and do something like this: Here’s another picture showing the, rather simplistic, structure of the first View Controller: The view controller on the left has a … Read more
For most uses, they will be the same… but not always. [UIApplication sharedApplication].keyWindow is the window which is currently being displayed on the device. This is normally your application’s window, but could be a system window. [UIApplication sharedApplication].delegate.window is the window your application is expected to use. Which one should be used? Well that all … Read more
Amit89 brought a way to a solution up. You have to call the .windowproperty of the AppDelegate. So I changed the Swift code from the link below to work as intended to find the topmost ViewController. Make sure, that the view is already in the view hierarchy. So this method cannot be called from a … Read more
UIWindow in a Storyboard project can be subclassed as explained in Apple’s UIApplicationDelegate reference: window When a storyboard is being used, the application must present the storyboard by adding it to a window and putting that window on-screen. The application queries this property for the window. The retained reference to the window by this property … Read more
You can read about some of the possible causes here: Technical Q&A QA1688 – Why won’t my UIViewController rotate with the device? In your situation its probably the fact that you are adding the view as another subview to the window. Only the first subview gets the rotation events. What you can do is add … Read more
@matt has the details, but there is a (somewhat horrible, somewhat awesome) workaround. (See edit below, though) let window = app.delegate?.window??.`self`() I will leave the understanding of this line of code as an exercise for the reader. OK, I lie, let’s break it down. app.delegate?.window OK, so far so good. At this point we have … Read more
Starting with Rob’s answer I played around a bit and would like to write down some notes for others trying to get information on this topic: It is not a problem at all to add another UIWindow. Just create one and makeKeyAndVisible. Done. Remove it by making another window visible, then release the one you … Read more
That’s an easy one: [aView convertPoint:localPosition toView:nil]; … converts a point in local coordinate space to window coordinates. You can use this method to calculate a view’s origin in window space like this: [aView.superview convertPoint:aView.frame.origin toView:nil]; 2014 Edit: Looking at the popularity of Matt__C’s comment it seems reasonable to point out that the coordinates… don’t … Read more
Edit The suggestion I make here is deprecated in iOS 15. So now what? Well, if an app doesn’t have multiple windows of its own, I presume the accepted modern way would be to get the first of the app’s connectedScenes, coerce to a UIWindowScene, and take its first window. But that is almost exactly … Read more