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).
Related
I'm building in content inside of a NSTableView, but when I compile and run, it cuts off the top half of all the content within the NSTableView. I'm brand new to the Swift language so I am quite lost here. I can provide further examples as necessary. Is there something simple I am missing first or is this more specific to my use case?
I can quickly give you a few directions to go looking for help.
Firstly the Apple Documentation for it. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/TableView/PopulatingView-TablesProgrammatically/PopulatingView-TablesProgrammatically.html
You may note that there are essentially two ways of populating the table view, programmatically by implementing the methods of NSTableViewDataSource and NSTableViewDelegate protocols. And by using Cocoa Bindings. I recommend, as a beginner, to use the first option and look at either example code or videos that use these protocols.
Secondly, this may be just a UI issue in your storyboard, make sure your constraints are set properly. You may just have some weird behavior going on here with other views.
Unfortunately, I cannot give you more help without code snippets or more information
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.
How can I change the styling/appearance of a TextButton in EXT GWT 3 ?
I am mostly interested in the background color.
Thank you, Horatiu
GXT 2x was easier ... but ... GXT 3 is supposed to be easier to maintain for large projects.
Sencha gives different ways for GXT 3 but the one I think I will use is to create an appearance and then pass it in via a constructor. Here is their example:
ContentPanel redContentPanel = new ContentPanel(new RedContentPanelAppearance());
The complete example is at:
Sencha's explanation and reasoning
Think you have to create your own appearance (based off an existing one and changing the bit you want) Not trivial it seems.
More reasoning on the Appearance usage is at gxt3 appearance explanation
Take a look at the style classes defined in ButtonCellBase.css and override them in your css.
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'm starting with android, and the app I'm developing is gonna need custom widgets look (glossy buttons, animated backgrounds etc.),
I've googled for any external libraries to achieve this and did not find anything.
let me guess, the only way to this is by painly extending base view classes and overriding onDraw etc. ?
You need to explore View Styles. You can customize almost any view element. You might not need any external library that extends and designs custom buttons.
More ref:
http://blog.androgames.net/40/custom-button-style-and-theme/
http://www.androidworks.com/changing-the-android-edittext-ui-widget
I like this library quite a lot: https://github.com/cyrilmottier/GreenDroid
It includes:
Action bar
Quick action
AsyncImageView
and a lot of other things
It's easy to use and nice for quick developments.