I need to display a text message on screen.
Currently I am doing this with a Text view on a transparent window, so the text is overlayed on the screen, perfectly.
The issue is that if am working on a text editor, or Excel, the popup shows up it blocks the text editor by an invisible rectangle around the text, i am unable to send mouse clicks or text keys to the window that i was working on.
I know there are ways to do it, some applications already do it, I just need to know how.
Take a look at this question. It is in Objective-C but the API details you need are there, you just need to do the equivalent in Swift. Whereas that answer draws a transparent red border you will draw your text transparent.
Related
I need to highlight text in epub book,when user selects the text,i can get the text,what the user has selected,but i need to highlight,the text permanently what user selected,thanks,any help will ne appreciated.
There's nothing built in to iOS that will do this. Some broad techniques that might work:
If you're showing the book in a web view, you might be able to wrap that area in a span and style it to create a highlight.
If you're using Core Text, you could draw the highlight in directly, either before or after drawing the text. (Your choice will decide how the highlight affects non-black text.)
You could add a transparent view over the text that draws in the highlight.
As for adding highlight-related items to the selection menu, see this Stack Overflow post. You probably won't be able to get icons in the menu like Apple does, though; that seems to be a private API. You could probably override the whole menu system if you want something closer to Apple's look, but that'll be quite a bit of work.
I would like to implement something like MMS app on iPhone, where user will have an option to include an image and text.
The way I did is i created a UIUiew and included a UITextView and UIImageView inside it, and when user selects an image it goes in to the UIImageView and the user can type in the UITextView.
But the problem that I am facing is once you insert a UIImage how do you put a cursor after the image so that user can delete(backspace) the image and that space free's up and it becomes available for the user to type in more text.
Simple answer: You cannot mix text and images in a UITextView. If you want to achieve a behavior like this, you should look into using Core Text to render the text yourself (it supports other elements inside the text via certain callbacks through which you tell the text system how much space it is supposed to reserve for the image.
To make the text editable, you would have to implement the text editing protocols UITextInput and UIKeyInput. Which means you have to basically write your own text editor. It's possible but it's a lot of work.
I have a weird behaviour that has only shown up in the last week. I don't use IB, all the controls are created in code.
I have a text field with a keyboard active. The first time I load the text field and use the keyboard, everything works normally. The second time I use it, the typed text does not show in the text field. However, the text is in the text field programmatically. For example, I can use it to execute a search. When the keyboard closes, the text appears.
Some of my UITextFields have misaligned text. For example, I write "hello", and instead of displaying centered inside the field like normal, it displays shifted several pixels downward to the extent that the bottom of the text is cut off. It's almost as if another view is chopping the bottom off the text by obscuring it.
I use three20, but according to http://groups.google.com/group/three20/browse_thread/thread/d7c4bc1ee2f9590d#, Xcode is suspected of causing the problem. I seen the behavior on 2 diferent macs, one running with Snow Leopard (10.6) and the other with Leopard (10.5).
This is how the problem looks in Xcode:
It is not obvious, but there is text in that search field. Notice that the placeholder text is not show. However, if I hit Search, the code executes with the entered text.
This is how the app appears in the simulator:
I finally find the reason.
I call [textField becomeFirstResponder] in a function called from loadView. But I move it to viewDidAppear and everything work Ok...
I've seen that happen with text fields and affine transforms. If you rotate a text field using a transform, the text shows up in a seemingly random part of the superview. If you use a transform to move the text field to make room for the keyboard, you might be seperating the embedded text editor from the field itself. That would also explain why the text is in the code because the text attribute of the text field is not affected by the visual layout of the UI.
We are trying to write a training manual application for the iPhone. On the top half of the screen is a diagram of a car engine, on the bottom half is some text. At the user repeatedly hits a "next" button, we highlight different parts of the engine, and in concert we highlight different parts of the descriptive text below.
We basically want "living text" in the text half, with the illustration following along on top to where the reader is in the text. What we'd like from the text is 1. user can scroll it using their thumb so possibly a UIScrollView 2. the software can explicitly drive a scroll to any part of the text (when they hit the "next" button). 3. the words in the text are interspersed with hotlinks e.g. "this is the camshaft... this is the piston..." and the user should be able to click on any of the keywords like camshaft, piston, and have the diagram highlight that. (The problem is not highlighting the diagram, its capturing the click). The text would have 300~400 buttons/links/keywords and about 600 words of text.
Since this is fairly similar to using a web browser, we tried using Apple's version of webkit using a UIWebView and handleOpenURL to register a service back to the app itself. But Webkit for internal links a popup comes up asking permission to access that link. Every single the user wants to go to a link (in our case just an internal event that we'd intercept so that we can highlight e.g. the camshaft). Tried to intercept the event from the HTML view, but that didn't work.
It seems like the best we can do is to abandon scrolling text, and make the text part more like flash cards or a power point presentation, breaking the text into custom UIViewCells with buttons inside a UIScrollView. However, this would impose an annoying constraint on the author that they would have to write everything to fit in the UIViewCells, sort of chunky.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
This is definitely something you can use a UIWebView for. Don't use handleOpenURL, rather, set your viewController as the webview's delegate, and override -webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:. When this gets called, check the request, and pull out your link data from there.
It would probably be easier to implement that completely in JavaScript in the document you load in a UIWebView. You would have to use JavaScript (i.e. [UIWebView stringbyevaluatingjavascriptfromstring:]) anyway to achieve things like scrolling to a certain position.
Does anyone have any examples or resources where i might find information on scrolling text which is too long to display in a button control? I'm thinking something along these lines.
Display as much text will fit within the current rect with a '...' at the end to signify overflow.
Pause for say 1 second then slowly scroll the text to the right edge displaying the right part of the string.
Display as much text will fit within the current rect with a '...' at the beginning to signify overflow.
Start the whole thing over in reverse.
Is there an easy way to do this using the "core" or built in "animation" frameworks on a certain mobile device?
[edit]
Iwanted to add some more details as i think people are more focused on wether or not what i'm trying to accomplish is appropriate. The button is for the answers on a trivia game. It does not perform any speciffic UI function but is for displaying the answer. Apple themselves is doing this in their iQuiz trivia game on the iPod Nano and i think its a pretty elegant solution to answers that are longer than the width of my button.
In case its the '...' that is the difficult part of this. Lets say i removed this requirement. Could i have the label for the button be full sized but clipped to the client rect of the button and use some animation methods to scroll it within the clipping rect? This would give me almost the same effect minus the ellipses.
Here's an idea: instead of ellipses (...), use a gradient on each side, so the extra text fades away into the background color. Then you could do this with three CALayers: one for the text and two for fade effect.
The fade masks would just be rectangles with a gradient that goes from transparent to the background color. They should be positioned above the text layer. The text would be drawn on the text layer, and then you just animate it sliding back and forth in the manner you describe. You can create a CGPath object describing the path and add it to a CAKeyframeAnimation object which you add to the text layer.
As for whether you think this is "easy" depends on how well you know Core Animation, but I think once you learn the API you'll find this isn't too bad and would be worth the trouble.
Without wishing to be obtuse, maybe you should rethink your problem. A button should have a clear and predictable function. It's not a place to store and display text. Perhaps you could have a description show on screen with a nice standard button below?
Update with source code example:
Here is some ready to use source code example (actually a full zipped Xcode project with image and nib files and some source code), not for the iPhone, not using Core Animation, just using a couple of simple NSImages and a NSImageView. It is just a cheap hack, it does not implement the full functionality you requested (sorry, but I don't feel like writing your source code for you :-P), horrible code layout (hey, I just hacked this together within a couple of minutes, so you can't expect any better ;-)) and it's just a demonstration how this can be done. It can be done with Core Animation, too, but this approach is simpler. Composing the button animation into a NSImageView is not as nice as subclassing a NSView and directly paint to its context, but it's much simpler (I just wanted to hack together the simplest solution possible). It will also not scroll back once it scrolled all the way to the right. Therefor you just need another method to scroll back and start another NSTimer that fires 2 seconds after you drew the dots to the left.
Just open the project in Xcode and hit run, that's all there is to do. Then have a look at the source code. It's really not that complicated (however, you may have to reformat it first, the layout sucks).
Update because of comment to my answer:
If you don't use Apple UI elements at all, I fail to see the problem. In that case your button is not even a button, it's just a clickable View (NSView if you use Cocoa). You can just sub-class NSView as MyAnswerView and overwrite the paint method to paint into the view whatever you wish. Multiline text, scrolling text, 3D text animated, it's completely up to your imagination.
Here's an example, showing how someone subclassed NSView to create a complete custom control that does not exist by default. The control looks like this:
See the funny thing in the upper left corner? That is a control. Here's how it works:
I hate to say that, as it is no answer to your question, but "Don't do that!". Apple has guidelines how to implement a user interface. While you are free to ignore them, Apple users are used to have UIs following these guidelines and not following them will create applications that Apple users find ugly and little appealing.
Here are Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
Let me quote from there
Push Button Contents and Labeling
A push button always contains text, it
does not contain an image. If you need
to display an icon or other image on a
button, use instead a bevel button,
described in “Bevel Buttons.”
The label on a push button should be a
verb or verb phrase that describes the
action it performs—Save, Close, Print,
Delete, Change Password, and so on. If
a push button acts on a single
setting, label the button as
specifically as possible; “Choose
Picture…,” for example, is more
helpful than “Choose…” Because buttons
initiate an immediate action, it
shouldn’t be necessary to use “now”
(Scan Now, for example) in the label.
Push button labels should have
title-style capitalization, as
described in “Capitalization of
Interface Element Labels and Text.” If
the push button immediately opens
another window, dialog, or application
to perform its action, you can use an
ellipsis in the label. For example,
Mail preferences displays a push
button that includes an ellipsis
because it opens .Mac system
preferences, as shown in Figure 15-8.
Buttons should contain a single verb or a verb phrase, not answers to trivia game! If you have between 2 and 5 answers, you should use Radio Buttons to have the user select the answer and an OK button to have the user accept the answer. For more than 5 answers, you should consider a Pop-up Selector instead according to guidelines, though I guess that would be rather ugly in this case.
You could consider using a table with just one column, one row per answer and each cell being multiline if the answer is very long and needs to break. So the user selects a table row by clicking on it, which highlights the table cell and then clicks on an OK button to finish. Alternatively, you can directly continue, as soon as the user selects any table cell (but that way you take the user any chance to correct an accidental click). On the other hand, tables with multiline cells are rather rare on MacOS X. The iPhone uses some, but usually with very little text (at most two lines).
Pretty sure you can't do that using the standard API, certainly not with UILineBreakMode. In addition, the style guide says that an ellipsis indicates that the button when pressed will ask you for more information -for example Open File... will ask for the name of a file. Your proposed use of ellipsis violates this guideline.
You'd need some custom logic to implement the behaviour you describe, but I don't think it's the way to go anyway.
This is not a very good UI practice, but if you still want to do it, your best bet is to do so via a clickable div styled to look like a button.
Set the width of the div to an explicit value, and its overflow to hidden, then use a script executing on an interval to adjust the scrollLeft property of this div.