In-app tutorial - iphone

Im looking at adding a tutorial kind of thing to my app. Basically I want to be able to give a quick message across of what the parts in the app do. I want the users to see it once and not again. I have searched relentlessly for this but I always found app building tutorials.
A lot of games have what I want but I cannot for the life of me find how to do it or, what it is called to find a tutorial. Could someone please help me out.
Thanks in advance,
Sam

You'll need to build it yourself.
What I usually do is, on top of the view i want to explain, add a semi transparent view with some arrows pointing at stuff and a small text/button explaining it. All of that has to be modal and you can save in the NSUserDefaults if the user has already seen it/skipped it/launched the app for the first time. You'd have a method that builds all those views and you simply call it in viewDidLoad (by checking against a simple boolean value store in those previously mentioned NSUserDefaults, for example)

Related

How to create tabs dynamically in Objective C

I am trying to implement the following kind of tabs into my Application. I have first tried it with creating buttons. So can anyone guide me how to create this kind of interface ?
I want to clarify that this are the groups & it will be dynamically created & it can be in any number.
Any suggestions & references will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
I've been implementing pretty much exactly what you are asking in an app im working on, i've uploaded the source files here. its pretty much plug-and-play, just make a TabView where you want your tabs and hook up the delegate methods. can swap out all the images with your own (my tabs were underneath something and not on top so they will look upside down initially for you).
Dont really have time to explain the inner workings of it all, but if you play around with the code im sure you will manage to customise it how you want. otherwise, just learn from it and implement your own.
edit: oh and there is some code that changes how the tabs look depending if iOS 7 or not, you will get an error when first importing it because i have a variable in my appDelegate isIOS7 which you can either implement in your app, or just take out all the relevant iOS 7 checks in the code

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.

Move the object in iPhone?

I want to ask a question about the iPhone application. I am going to write a application, and the application can let the users to move the list or folder just like you move the app in the home page in iPhone. Is it possible to do it? Thank you.
It is possible to move stuff like moving the app in the home page. It can be hard but it is possible. You need to handle all the touch events inside your view controller and then decide to move stuff. There is no built-in ViewController for doing that for you.
Everything is possible. So the answer to your question is: Yes.
But I don't think that's what you wanted to know - there's no convenient or existing way to implement something like this, you would have to do it all by yourself.

iphone application layout

I'm trying to get started with an iPhone application, I had a look around at other questions but i'm still sorta stuck so hopefully someone can help...
First thing is I'm totally confused with the whole view concept, I'm more used to visual studio so I'm going to use the term 'form' to describe what I have in my head.
I want to achieve a home screen in an application with say 9 icons (much like the iphone home screen) which each lead to a different 'form'. Each form may have a different function so say one might be a simple calculator, one might play a video etc.
How do I do this, its destroying my soul trying to do something so simple... If you guys even have any links to get me on the right track it would be greatly appreciated
I suggest you take a look at the Stanford iPhone Programming Course. If you don't have the time to look through it all, I reccommend at least Lectures 5 and 6 about Views and ViewControllers. The slides are quite instructive and they come with video presentations that should help you get on your way in about an hour.
Apple's samples are a great place to start. There are some simple ones that can show you how views and view controllers work.
Also, in Xcode, when you create a new iPhone app template, that template usually has enough code to display a view, and sometimes a flip-side view or more. Sometimes, you should stop reading, and do.
I had the same weird learning curve as you, as things don't initially seem to make sense but they do - and once you've got your head round them they make perfect sense trust me!
Your 'forms' are viewControllers in this M-V-C land, they control all the 'view' (which are controls or any object which can be seen) within them. Normally they are loaded from a Nib (design from the interface builder), but don't have to be.
The way I would go about your problem is to use a navigationController as the base to handle all of your view controllers.
A navigation controller needs a rootviewcontroller to start so this will be your desktop Viewcontroller. I'm not sure how you are planning to populate this but all the icons will need to be stored in some kind of array. I suggest you use a simple UIButton. When then button is pressed you then alloc and init and push the required view controller.