We can’t say the journey towards Catalyst was a bed of roses. The autofill engine: It is now powered by Machine Learning, making the browsing experience faster than ever.It allowed us to reuse many UI components. We rewrote the entire interface in SwiftUI: Since our iOS app is mostly using SwiftUI and our Catalyst app will only support macOS Big Sur, it was a natural move for us.We reused the same technology in this new app, with two major differences: With Dashlane for Safari, we learnt how to build App Extensions, a solution based on AppKit. With the current state of the Catalyst app, they were already able to use the OS autofill, but we wanted to offer the full Dashlane experience in the browser too. Our goal with this app was to provide a great experience for Safari users. Apart from that, after a few small improvements and tweaks (using menus instead of action sheets, some typography adjustments…), our iPad app was looking better than ever before. The main focus was to rebuild the navigation. We worked with our designers to replace the iPhone’s tab bar navigation with a shiny new sidebar navigation that would be more practical and provide quick access to all our features. It had the same features as the iPhone app however, because its interface was not optimized, it ended up looking like the same iPhone app on a bigger screen.Īs a Catalyst app is an iPad app built for macOS, we first decided to improve the iPad experience. First Catalyst build. Sheesh, look at those margins! □ Getting Catalyst up and running □ Pimp my iPad appĭashlane’s iPad app has not evolved a lot recently. The introduction of Mac Catalyst in 2019 allowed developers to turn their iPad apps into native macOS apps easily, which meant we could adapt the code we already had in a shorter timespan, so Safari users could enjoy the same features as on our other browser extensions, in a new and lightweight format.Ĭatalyst would help us build a great Dashlane app, completely integrated within the Apple ecosystem, and benefit from everything we had already built for iOS/iPad! We knew that the refactor of our iOS app would make it possible.Īfter a few changes to our Xcode project, the Catalyst app was alive! All the features we had on iPad were there, even app extensions like the Widget or the Credential Autofill, almost for free! It is one of the major advantages of using the Catalyst technology: all the new features we build for the iOS app will be available at the same time for our Safari users, without additional development. Over the years, Apple has made many improvements to the iPad environment, making it closer to Mac’s desktop user experience. Thankfully, Apple had a solution for us: Mac Catalyst, a way to bring our iPad app to macOS. Introducing Catalyst ✨ĭuring our last company hackathon, we challenged ourselves to build a better experience for our Safari users without rebuilding everything from scratch. Due to the way the Safari App Extension was built, we unfortunately couldn’t offer the full Dashlane experience on this Extension in the same way our Chrome extension could. We needed another way. The codebase of all our core features was shared between the two apps to ship faster and more reliably. It allowed us to have a new native interface while sharing code with the iOS app. In 2020, we built Dashlane for Safari, an App Extension where users could see, synchronize and autofill their data. It’s offered a wide feature set, from managing credentials to sharing items with your friends and family. Earlier this year, we announced that we would deprecate our desktop apps to prioritize our browser extensions, allowing us to focus on what matters the most for our users, reducing friction while on the web! Today, our extensions offer a great experience for Chrome and Firefox users, and we aim to do the same for Safari users. Dashlane’s macOS app has been around for years.
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