I'm in the process of migrating one of my app's Apple Watch complications from ClockKit to WidgetKit.
In my ClockKit complications, there are some cases where a show the relative time since the last event in the app (for example, "25MIN").
With ClockKit, this was quite straightforward using a CLKTextProvider designed for this exact purpose:
CLKRelativeDateTextProvider(date: date, style: .offsetShort, units: [.hour, .minute])
This has always worked great, since it lets me specify that hours and minutes should be used, but not seconds, since they're not relevant here.
How can I accomplish the same thing with WidgetKit and SwiftUI?
The closest thing I've found is this:
Text(date, style: .relative)
It shows, for example: 14MIN 8SEC
This is not what I want, since it shows seconds. It makes the complication look messy with all the extra information, and is distracting because it updates every second until an hour has passed.
I suppose I could write my own logic to create a new timeline entry every minute to show the number of hours and minutes since the last update, but since CLKTextProvider works so nicely I wanted to check whether there is some way to accomplish the same thing without creating a new entry for every minute.
There seem to be some more customizable options with date formatters, but I haven't found a way to combine this with the SwiftUI version that updates automatically on the Apple Watch face: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/date/relativeformatstyle/3766585-presentation