ios-settings-patterns

name	ios-settings-patterns
description	Apple-platform settings design for signalbox - which control shape fits which problem, what status text should say, and the anti-patterns this project keeps rediscovering. Use when adding or changing anything in the macOS Settings window, the iOS Settings tab, or any pane that pairs a control with live state.

Settings patterns

Covers macOS and iOS. Most of it is macOS because that is where signalbox's settings window lives; the iOS notes are marked.

Read this before adding a control. The recurring failure in this project is not bad copy, it is reaching for a checkbox plus a paragraph when the problem wanted a different shape entirely.

The one rule that catches most mistakes

A settings pane is controls, not prose. If a control needs a paragraph to explain it, the paragraph is a symptom: either the label is wrong, the shape is wrong, or the explanation belongs in the docs. Apple's own guidance is blunt about it:

Minimize the number of settings you offer. Although people appreciate having control over an app, too many settings can make the experience feel less approachable, while also making it hard to find a particular setting.

Corollary that decides a surprising number of arguments:

When possible, prefer letting people modify task-specific options without going to your settings area.

If the option only matters while looking at a particular view, it belongs in that view. This is why signalbox's jumplist filter does not belong in Settings.

Pick the shape from the problem

The problem	The shape	Precedent
A binary that needs no explanation	Checkbox, label says it all, no caption	Any macOS app
A binary with one non-obvious consequence	Checkbox plus ONE caption line	System Settings throughout
A choice between 2-4 exclusive modes	Radio buttons, one caption line each	Little Snitch operation mode
A choice between many peers	List or table, not radios	Sharing pane
A background job with progress and results	Toggle in Settings; progress in the surface that uses it	Spotlight, Photos, iCloud Drive, Alfred
Something needing verification before use	Field plus an explicit Test button	WireGuard, Zotero sync
Diagnostics	Help menu, or a separated button group. Never an inline hyperlink	~10 of 10 apps surveyed

The row this project keeps getting wrong is the background job, and the answer is less UI than it looks. Apple does not put index progress in Settings at all:

• Spotlight shows its indexing bar in the Spotlight search window. System Settings has only the category checkboxes.
• Photos shows "last updated with iCloud Photos" plus Pause/Resume at the bottom of the Library window, not in Settings.
• iCloud Drive shows a filling pie wedge in Finder and a transfer line in Finder's status bar.
• Alfred puts a Rebuild button in Preferences > Advanced and leaves the progress to Spotlight's own indicator.

The split is consistent: Settings holds the switch and the expensive action. The surface that uses the index holds the progress. That is also where progress is load-bearing - a search run against a half-built index silently misses things, and the person needs to know that at the moment they search, not in a pane they are not looking at.

So a checkbox with a status caption is wrong twice over: wrong shape, and wrong place.

What status text should say

From this project's own research (six independent agents, integration/remote-hub/scratch/synthesis.md):

• Render live reality, never intent. What is actually true right now, from something that probed it, not what the settings file says should be true. A stale green light destroys trust faster than a missing one.
• Say the capability, not the mechanism. "Your devices can open this board from anywhere" beats "upstream connected". The user's question is what they can now do.
• A degraded state keeps its label, says the cause, and names what happens next. Mullvad's three-part form. "Can't reach your cloud board right now. Events are being kept and will be sent when it's back." beats "Offline".
• Counts should be the unit the user thinks in. Not the unit the implementation happens to store. Signalbox indexes transcript FILES but people think in SESSIONS, and a session's subagent transcripts are separate files sharing its id - reporting files overstated sessions by 3.4x.

Structure

• Multi-pane with a toolbar is the macOS default past one topic; a single flat pane is earned by having few settings, not a default to drift out of.
• Six toolbar tabs maximum. General first.
• Window title becomes the pane name once there is more than one pane.
• Restore the last viewed pane on open.
• Open-ended lists of things (agents, devices) get sections inside one pane, not a tab each: tabs have a hard cap and the list does not.
• A feature earns its own pane when it has more than one control. One checkbox alone does not; a checkbox plus an expensive action such as Rebuild does, and Alfred's Advanced tab is exactly that.

iOS notes

• Grouped Form sections with a footer per section; the footer is the one place a sentence of explanation is idiomatic, and it is still one sentence.
• Destructive or expensive actions get a confirmation, not a caption warning.
• A background job shows progress inline in the row it belongs to, not in a separate status area - screens are narrow and a second area reads as unrelated.

Anti-patterns, all observed in this project

1. Status bolted onto a checkbox. A checkbox that flips on and then grows a caption reporting what a background job is doing. Wrong anchor and wrong place: the progress belongs in the surface that uses the job, and Settings keeps the switch.
2. A paragraph explaining the feature. Settings panes are not documentation. If someone needs to know what session contents search is, that is a docs page.
3. Showing a mode you cannot change there. If the pane displays a state, the pane must let you change it. Show-but-not-configure violates the basic contract of a settings screen.
4. Mechanism in the UI. Bind addresses, ports, tokens, byte offsets. The only legitimate transport field is a URL someone must type, and it gets a Test button.
5. An inline "open log" hyperlink. Reads as "opens a web page". Diagnostics live in the Help menu.
6. Explaining privacy in the pane. Where data lives is a docs question unless the user is being asked to consent to something surprising at that moment.

Worked example: session contents search

The feature is a local transcript index: a toggle, a long first build, a size on disk, and a rebuild. Four wrong answers were tried before the right one, and each is a pattern above.

1. A checkbox and a three-line paragraph in the General pane. Wrong: the paragraph is documentation, and the pane's other controls each have a label and one caption.
2. The same, with better prose. Still wrong: improving the wording of a paragraph that should not exist.
3. Its own tab with a labelled status block (Time Machine shape). Closer, but it puts progress where nobody is looking when it matters.
4. What shipped: a Search tab holding the checkbox and a Rebuild Index... button, and the progress moved to the jumplist's search row as indexing 62%. That is the moment the state changes what the user should believe, because a search against a half-built index silently under-reports.

The general lesson: ask where the state changes a decision, and put it there. Settings is where you change the setting, not where you watch the work.

Before you ship a settings change

• Could the label alone carry it, with no caption?
• Is every sentence load-bearing, or is it explaining the feature?
• Does the status line say what is true right now, from a live probe?
• Are the counts in the user's units?
• Does the pane let you change everything it shows?
• Have you updated components/specs/settings.html? The mock IS the spec, and its status-string table is exhaustive - an unlisted string is a spec bug.

Where the evidence lives

integration/remote-hub/scratch/ holds a six-agent research fleet on this exact question: synthesis.md (start here), research-r3-claude.md (HIG rules and per-app conventions, the most reusable), research-r1-*.md (Tailscale, WireGuard, Mullvad, Docker Desktop mode-and-status patterns), research-r4-kimi.md (where diagnostics belong). synthesis.md also carries a copy bank of the best strings found.