Flutter with AdMob banner persistence through entire app - flutter

I need to have an admob banner on top my Flutter app visible at all times AND not have to care about it being visible after I shuffle my app's pages.
I don't want to touch it, reload on page change, recreate it and so on - waste of time.
So far it's been over a year that I've made it work with two MaterialApps nested inside one another - one parent with SafeArea (banner goes in there) and the second one is where the app actually "lives" and goes about navigating its pages with cool transition effects and so on.
Before telling me how wrong it is - it WORKS. In production app serving thousands of people daily. Zero problems so far.
However, I'd like to know, with all the recent Flutter updates and stuff, maybe there's finally a more elegant solution to this?

Related

Load a dynamic animation from disk in flutter

I am building a flutter application for a donation Kiosk, that would be deployed on tablets that connect to card readers.
I would like the home screen presented to users to contain a custom animation that can be loaded from a disk file (or downloaded) so that we could develop these custom animations for each NGO with ought building separate apps for each case.
The animation should be dynamic, meaning it should be able to take some parameters from the flutter app (ex: number of donations from the last 24h) and change the layout slightly (ex: show a number of trees based on that number).
I found some animation libraries but all of them would mean coding them inside the app, which is not the best scenario for us.
Is this possible? Can you help me by pointing in the right direction :)
Thank you!

May many webviews cause my app to crash on my iphone 4?

//The point
I gradually load many objects (UIWebView) to the memory and after a while it crashes. Please Help
//Details
I have a UIScrollView with horizontal paging, wherein each page (with a separate view controller) contains a UIWebView with disabled user interaction. At first only webview #0 on page 0 gets loaded and as I advance through the pages the app gradually sends requests to load specific data. Downloaded data stay in memory.
After I load about 20 Webviews from internet source, my app freezes and crashes. If I use a dummy html string stored on the device, this happens after I load about 50 webview. But the problem persists.
I fixed much of the leaks and am only left with Mallocs. Since the problem does not occur with low quantities of UIWebviews Loaded I assume that I have to change my code to say 3 webviews and reuse them. But I don't know if that'd fix the issue. I have developed several apps before which don't crash and this is a unique case.
I store pointers to webviews and some other elements inside every Webview (such as labels) in arrays. The arrays get incremented in count with every new page loaded.
I use xcode 4.3 and a jailbroken iphone 4 to develop. I turned off requiring signatures in my xcode as a result of which the app gets copied onto my phone yet fails to attach to process. I cannot debug on my phone. My app works well in simulator but crashes a while after I launch it on the phone by tapping the icon.
From what I am able to describe as so, what do you think might be the problem?
Thanks
Yes, certainly having too many UIWebViews will cause a crash due to low memory. I'm not sure what your reason is for having multiple UIWebViews, but I would follow through with your idea to reuse a smaller amount of them instead of creating several.
Based on your device not crashing when you use a small amount, I would say that the problem lies in the use of too many UIWebViews and not in a compatibility problem with your jailbroken device, for example.
WebKit is notorious for its memory hogging. It mallocs large blocks of memory and fails before giving you the opportunity to release other resources. One UIWebView is bad enough. I've had this problem in apps with as few a 5 UIWebViews, let alone 50.
There are a couple of things you can try. One, if the web pages aren't too complicated, you could use a replacement view such as DTCoreText to render them. If you have to have webviews, you could cache the various HTML contents and re-render using one UIWebView.
You only need to use three UIWebView's for paging. Lets say the user is on page 2 (page 1 is the left page and page 3 is to the right). When the uses swipes to page 3, you could just display the web view currently on page 1 on page 3. You need to re-load the proper html when the user swipes between the pages.
With some caching of the web content, speed shouldn't be a problem once the stuff is downloaded.

iOS - How to show hints for gestures for iOS app?

I have seen some apps where when you launch them for the first time after downloading (e.g. Chrome app on iPhone), it shows you a list of animated gestures on the screen, kind of giving you a tour of the app.
How do I build one something like that? And how does the app know to launch only for the first time after download and not since then? For the second question, I am guessing a "shown=TRUE" value can be saved inside a PList file and checking the value each time when the app finished launching. But I am more curious about the mechanism involved in creating a guided app tour.
You can use transparent and semi-transparent images with a UIImageView, so you can make up an image with arrows and notes and put over the whole screen. You could fade it out when the user taps.
To know if it's the first time running the app, you should use NSUserDefaults instead of a plist; it's much easier, and you should be app to find a quick tutorial on that fairly easily.
Also, you could check around on this site for controls like this one. I haven't used any of them myself, so I'm not sure how much they differ from a regular UIImageView. They look nice though.

Taking an iAd across multiple screens

I'm sure there's a simple answer to this but it's beginning to annoy me now!
I have an iAd integrated into my app which appears and works on the screen I've implemented it in. The app uses a NavigationController to move between multiple screens, but the iAd is only on one of them. After moving from start to finish through my app several times I get a message appear in GDB saying:
Too many active banners (11). Creation of new banners will be throttled.
The app then crashes.
I have tried looking through the Apple documentation and searched on Google and can't see a solution to the problem.
If anyone has any idea how I can resolve the issue it would definitely stop me from going mad! Thanks.
It sounds like you're not removing your iAds when views hide. I suggest doing the creation in viewWillAppeaer and removing ads in the viewDidDisappear method. Like this, you'l only end up with as many banners as you create in the visible view. It sounds like you're using the viewdidLoad/viewWillUnload pair instead.
Another alternative is to create the ADBannerView in a fixed location across all screens. It's a little bit harder than the above method, but it looks nice. For example, if you have a tab bar controller application, you can do the following in your app delegate:
[self.myTabBarController.view addSubview:self.myAdView];
It can get a little bit tricky to place other views underneath the ad.

How to use Sleep in the application in iphone

I have used to loading a default image in my appication. So i have set to,
Sleep(3); in my delegate.m class.
But sometimes it will take more than 6 to 7 minutes. So i want to display the image 3 seconds only and then it goes to my appilcation based on my requirements.
Which one is best way to do that?
Sleep(3) or [NSThread sleepForTimeInterval:3.0] or something else;
And i must display the image 3 seconds only. Please explain me.
(Note: And I declared setter and getter methods only in my deleagte class.)
Please explain me.
As Rob noted, Apple strongly recommends against a splash screen unless it hides some necessary behind the scenes process (like loading game graphics.) It is so strongly discouraged that some people have claimed that their apps have been rejected for using an unnecessary splash screen.
The default.png doesn't exist to create a splash screen. Instead it exist to allow you to create the illusion that your initial view loads faster than it does. You supposed to use it to provide an image of your initial view so that the enduser can begin to cognitively orient themselves to the interface. By the time they have oriented themselves to the interface and moved their finger to touch the interface, it is live.
Why? Because iPhone apps are supposed be quick in, quick out. People don't sit down to use them at a desk like a desktop. People use then on the go. Sometimes they use them in the middle of a conversation.
I tell my clients to test out the usability of their apps (except for games) while walking, riding an exercise bike etc as well as in the middle of a face-to-face and phone conversation. In those circumstances, a three second pause is a big deal and very noticeable especially if the app is a practical app. Imagine if every time you opened the Contact app you had to pause three seconds to see an Apple splash screen. You would get peeved in a hurry.
The key thing here is that an unnecessary splash screen doesn't add any value for the user. It is a selfish act on the part of the software publisher to eat the end users time so that the publisher can build brand recognition for the sole benefit of the publisher. Wasting three seconds of the users time every time they use the app adds up in a hurry. (In my experience, it also makes the user perceive that the overall app is slow and clunky.)
However, if you do want to shoot yourself in the foot or if you have a client hell bent on a splash screen, you do it like this:
The splash screen appears until the first view loads so you delay the loading of the first view. In the app delegates applicationDidFinishLaunching: method, remove all the code that loads the first view into the window. Replace it with a NSTimer. Put the code to load the first view in the timer's fire method.
With that setup the app will display the default.png as it launches, when it gets to applicationDidFinishLaunching:it will appear to pause from the end users perspective because no view will appear to replace the default.png.
You should note that the standard launch time for an app is 3-5 seconds. So you may not have to do anything to show the splash screen for 3 seconds. It might happen automatically.
Apple strictly recommends against this (using sleep in this way), especially in the scenario of showing a splash screen.
The best thing to do is create a view that looks like your Default.png file, then have that be the first NIB.. you could then set an NSTimer to transition (with animation if you want) to your main view/window/controller.