Icons and Badges for Live Activities

Live Activities can now carry more context at a glance with optional SF Symbol icons and compact badge labels.

Last week we shipped the new alert Live Activity type with an icon and badge. We have now extended icon support across every Live Activity type, and added badge support to the layouts where a compact label fits: alert, progress, and segmented_progress.

What Changed

• icon is available on stats, metrics, segmented_progress, progress, and alert.
• badge is available on alert, progress, and segmented_progress.

Use icons and badges to make active work easier to scan on the Lock Screen. A backup can show its storage target, an incident can show severity, and a deployment can show the environment before anyone reads the full title.

Icons and badges use the same Live Activity tint colors already available:

Add an Icon to Any Live Activity

Use icon when the Live Activity should be recognizable before someone reads the title. For example, icons can help distinguish servers, deployments, queues, backups, search indexing, customer events, incidents, and other active workflows.

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await activitysmith.liveActivities.stream("prod-web-1", {
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  content_state: ActivitySmith.contentState({
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    title: "Server Health",
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    subtitle: "prod-web-1",
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    type: "metrics",
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    icon: ActivitySmith.alertIcon("server.rack", { color: "blue" }),
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    metrics: [
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      { label: "CPU", value: 18, unit: "%" },
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      { label: "MEM", value: 72, unit: "%" },
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    ],
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  }),
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  action: {
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    title: "Dashboard",
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    type: "open_url",
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    url: "https://ops.example.com/servers/prod-web-1",
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  },
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});

Picking a SF Symbol

The icon.symbol value is the name of a SF Symbol. Browse the catalog with one of these tools:

• ActivitySmith app - Open Settings -> SF Symbols to browse 45 hand-picked icons ready to use
• SF Symbols - Apple's official macOS app
• Interactful - free third-party iOS app listing all SF Symbols under Foundations -> Iconography

Add a Badge When the Label Matters

Use badge for a short category, environment, service, customer, region, or severity label.

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await activitysmith.liveActivities.stream("nightly-database-backup", {
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  content_state: ActivitySmith.contentState({
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    title: "Nightly Database Backup",
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    subtitle: "verify restore",
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    type: "progress",
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    badge: ActivitySmith.alertBadge("S3", { color: "cyan" }),
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    percentage: 62,
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    color: "green",
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  }),
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});

Availability

Available now across the API, SDKs, CLI, and playground.

This feature is available in the ActivitySmith iOS app version 1.10.0 and newer.