UIPasteboard is a wonderfully simple little type with a ton of great functionality inside. (Covered previously in Bite #45). Today we'll check out the latest pasteboard improvements in iOS 10. Let's begin.

The biggest new user-facing feature of pasteboards in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra is the Universal Clipboard. This allows users to copy some content into their clipboard on one device, and retrieve it on another.

We don't need to do anything to get this functionality in our apps. This behavior is on by default for UIPasteboard.general, but we can configure how items behave when we add them.

Expiration Dates

let tomorrow = Date().addingTimeInterval(60 * 60 * 24)

UIPasteboard.general.setItems(
  [[ "URL": URL(string: "https://littlebitesofcocoa.com")! ]],
  options: [.expirationDate : tomorrow]
)

Preventing Universal Clipboard

Sometimes there's going to be data that doesn't make sense to sync using the Universal Clipboard. This is easy.

UIPasteboard.general.setItems(
  [[ "URL": URL(string: "https://littlebitesofcocoa.com")! ]],
  options: [.localOnly : true]
)

has* Properties

Last but not least, UIPasteboard has a few new helper properties for easily checking the current state of a pasteboard:

// we can check for images, URLs,
// strings, and colors this way
if pasteboard.hasURLs {
  print(UIPasteboard.general.urls)
}