Does anyone know, how (if possible) to get font style for static text element?
I can't find any information about it.
You can't do this with XCTest UI tests - the framework is deliberately designed so that you can't access non-functional properties of elements such as color and style. This is to encourage you to use the UI testing framework to write functional integration tests.
Checking the style of a label should be done in a unit test, where you will be able to access these properties of the UILabel.
Related
Coming from the .NET world, I was used to naming my UI elements with the type prefix. Examples:
btnSend
lblName
etc...
The advantage is that in intellisense/autocomplete, the moment I start typing "btn..." I get to see the list of all my buttons.
However, I find that in Swift, the most common approach is to name UI elements with a type suffix instead:
sendButton
nameLabel
usersTableView
etc...
The problem is that I can't remember the names of all my buttons. When I start typing "butto...", I was hoping to see a list of all my buttons, but instead I'm seeing all the framework classes first, and I have to scroll down to see my stuff.
So, my question: is there a convention for naming UI elements? Does Apple recommend naming a button as sendButton instead of btnSend (or buttonSend)? Is there a setting in XCode that will allow me to see items I defined first in the autocomplete list?
You can use any style as long as you are consistent with it throughout your application but still, if you want to go through the design guidelines you can check swift-style-guide by raywenderlich and api-design-guidelines from Apple.
What's the best way to perform simple default styling?
I'm not interested in styling every single UI element in the interface builder and the UIAppearance proxy seems to be very limited. I am looking for solutions to default styling UI elements with low coupling.
note that i am using swift 3 / xcode 8
UIAppearance is the default styling mechanism in UIKit. It doesn't seem very limited to me, yet it indeed has some downsides. You should give it a try if you haven't yet.
If you're interested in a non-UIAppearance-based approach, it's possible to craft even more powerful custom styling mechanism. For example, I've been able to attach and compose styles in the following manner:
final class CaptionLabel: UILabel, CaptionFontStyle, MultilineLabelStyle
See Style.swift and RootStyle.swift in the StyleSheet library for implementation details (it's really simple and there is an example project as well).
What are some best practices of theming/skinning an iOS app?
Examples:
Using custom images as screen backgrounds.
Modifying the look of UITableView tables.
Buttons with a custom look.
Links to good tutorials are a plus.
You can create a protocol that defines methods to return theme-specific colors, images, etc. All classes that conform to this protocol have to implement these methods.
#protocol MyCustomThemes <NSObject>
-(UIFont*)writingAreaFont;
-(UIColor*)dataCellLabelColor;
-(UIImage*)dataCellBackgroundImage;
#end
I can suggest that:
Make theme class
Make function to return background image(s)
Make function to return data cell.
make any required function in the theme class.
the init function should have one parameter to plist file that contains the assets(images) that will be needed for your class to work properly. it should be a plist file that contains a dictionary for a predefined keys.
I hope that helps.
You might take a look at NUI, which lets you modify the theme/skin of an app very easily, and save that theme for other apps, too.
For example, if you wanted to use a custom image for the background of all of your UIViews, you would just put the following in the NUI style sheet:
ViewBackgroundImage String MyImage.png
NUI supports styling for UITableViews and UIButtons, too (as mentioned in your other examples).
You might want to check out Freestyle. It's built on Pixate, and styles your app with structured Sass. You can do as little as change the variable values to make a new theme, or extend and customize it via CSS or Sass.
Old question, but still - if you're looking for best practices, then UIAppearance is probably it.
However, if you're looking for a more powerful way to style your app (and create themes) - also have a look at InterfaCSS. InterfaCSS uses stylesheets inspired by CSS (and Less/Sass) that support a rich selector syntax and lets you use standard UIKit property names.
I know this may be late but I've stumbled upon a theme framework called Pixate. Pixate allows you to theme all your components using css. It's native meaning no web views and what not AND its fairly easy to implement in an existing project. Check it out.
I have learned that in iOS 5, properties that are marked with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR can be styled using appearance. Eg [[UINavigationBar appearance] setTintColor:....]. However, I seem not to be able to style all elements. UIButton, for instance, has no properties marked UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR, hence I am not able to use the above technique to style it.
My question is: How do I best style elements globally (all appearances in the application), when I cannot use appearance?
Right now I have defined some colors, fonts, shadow offsets etc. that I use many different places in my code. This allows me to change the look and behaviour of a lot of elements, but it still doesn't allow me to style all instances of a certain object with only one line of code.
Edit
In lack of better solutions I have created a number of categories with simple methods as the following:
+ (UIButton *)customLabelWithFrame:(CGRect)frame andText:(NSString *)text;
Also I have found that - in combination with the described categories - stretchable images are nice and useful.
With the above I am able to style in a global-ish manner, however I am not satisfied with the result and I still hope to find a better solution
What about standard subclassing or factory classes, as you mentioned yourself!?
For buttons I'm using factory classes myself.
I think a really nice solution could be the Android way of designing interfaces. Android relies on XML files to define the user interface. As a matter of fact, I'm working on a library that aims to give the projects I'm working on much the same capabilities. It's still a work in progress / experiment and as such really messy code (you have been warned!), but it might give you some ideas.
An example project can be downloaded here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6487838/WSLayoutManager.zip
Experiment a bit with the XML files by adding controls. Create custom control classes and instantiate them from the XML file, etc... It's fun stuff :)
I want to have in my SWT project controls (Button-s, Text-s, etc) with predefined styles. My first idea was to extend for example org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Text class, set some settings and use that new classes instead of original, but get org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Subclassing not allowed exception. How to do that right ?
You have to override checkSubclass method to do nothing, otherwise it will complain that subclassing not allowed - because usually you shouldn't really override standard components.
#Override
protected void checkSubclass() {
// Disable the check that prevents subclassing of SWT components
}
You also should consider building custom widgets containing primitive controls using delegation. For example you can build MyText which will contain Text widget inside with custom setup.
Thing to remember is SWT provides standard controls which looks natively on each on platform. Anyway polishing standard components is still allowed and even a must in production software.
See the SWT Faq for this concern. There you'll find also a link howto write custom widgets