I have been making the native iPhone app and I have never used a xib, I mainly used to make the application in run time based, but know with the introduction of Main Story Board. I just want to know which one will be easier for using run time based which I mainly used to or start using story board.
Both have its own advantage and Storyboard has more options and ease when used in the right way (that is why it is introduced!).
By using storyboard
You can avoid so many line of code for page navigation and all
Complete picture of project is visible
By xib
Used a lot and hence more easy
Independent,so can be worked better
For working as a team xib is preferrable since the conflicts can be less if each team member working in seperate files
MY SOLUTION
Since it is possible to use both in same project. I use both in my projects. To take the both advantages according to my requirement.
You'll probably want to use a Storyboard(s) in the long run. However, there are pros and cons:
Pros
You can see your whole project
You avoid a whole lot of nasty code
You can visually 'hook' stuff together
Cons
Only available >iOS 5.0 <<<<Huge!
In my personal experience, I usually use Storyboards - the percentage of devices running < iOS 5 is actually quite low.
Related
I'm a totally blind developer who would like to do iPhone development. From what I've heard most of Xcode is accessible with voiceover, the screen reader built into the Mac. My understanding is that the interface builder is mostly to completely inaccessible for blind users. Assuming I can not use interface builder is there an alternative way of creating simple to moderately complex user interfaces? I really don't want to spend $600 on a Mac to find out that it will be nothing more then a paper weight for me.
You don't necessarily need Interface Builder. In fact, some friends who work at Apple say they mostly code the interface. If you can code so far, i'm sure you can code the interface as well.
I'm also a blind developer. Over Christmas I purchased a second hand Mac, and spent 2 weeks on exactly this.
It was certainly possible to develop a complete app without Interface Builder. I used tricks like setting the text in a label, sizing the label, and then programatically calculating the absolute position for the next control by adding some space between controls.
Probably like yourself, I've always wanted to create things myself as it's more fun, and you can experiment more quickly. There's also a certain amount of pride - if you can do it yourself, who needs to hire help.
But what I realised is that my UI was pretty functional, but not at all esthetically pleasing. Most iPhone apps don't just have UI controls on a plain background - there's often a lot of colorful icons and pretty backgrounds involved.
The deal braker for me, personally, was reading the Apple guidelines and seeing that you need icons which conform to some pretty stringent guidelines, in at least two different sizes. The application icon is important as this is much of how people choose whether to download something.
So, if I have to hire a designer to make my icons, I may as well get them to lay out the UI.
Ideally, Interface Builder would be accessible enough to drag controls onto a view (not possible today), and bind them to code. We could then develop an application with no regard for how the controls were layed out, hire a designer, let them do whatever they want with the xib and our code would continue working.
Just my thoughts based on personal experience - there are many resources for learning to create UIs without IB if that's the route you choose.
Interface builder is provided as one way to design user interfaces, but it does not do anything that can't also be done in code. It's a way of building object archives containing (mostly) user interface objects, which can be un-archived and used at run time. But the same objects and properties could be set up in Objective-C and would work just as well.
Apple usually does a better job with accessibility. If Interface Builder is not accessible, I suggest filing a bug at http://bugreport.apple.com/ about it.
I am about to start building an app that will be used across all platforms. I will using monotouch and monodriod so I can keep things in .net
I'm a little lazy so I want to be able to reuse as much code as possible.
Lets say I want to create an application that stores contact information. e.g. Name & Phone number
My application needs to be able to retrieve data from a web service and also store data locally.
The MVVM pattern looks like the way to go but im not sure my approach below is 100% correct
Is this correct?
A project that contains my models
A project that contains my views,local storage methods and also view models which I bind my views to. In this case there would be 3 different projects based on the 3 os's
A data access layer project that is used for binding to services and local data storage
Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks for your time
Not specifically answering your question, but here are some lazy pointers...
you can definitely reuse a lot of code across all 3 platforms (plus MonoWebOS?!)
reusing the code is pretty easy, but you'll need to maintain separate project files for every library on each platform (this can be a chore)
MVVM certainly works for WP7. It's not quite as well catered for in MonoTouch and MonoDroid
some of the main areas you'll need to code separately for each device are:
UI abstractions - each platform has their own idea of "tabs", "lists", "toasts", etc
network operations - the System.Net capabilities are slightly different on each
file IO
multitasking capabilities
device interaction (e.g. location, making calls etc)
interface abstraction and IoC (Ninject?) could help with all of these
The same unit tests should be able to run all 3 platforms?
Update - I can't believe I just stumbled across my own answer... :) In addition to this answer, you might want to look at MonoCross and MvvmCross - and no doubt plenty of other hybrid platforms on the way:
https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross
http://monocross.net (MVC Rather then Mvvm)
Jonas Follesoe's cross platform development talk: Has to be the most comprehensive resource out there at the moment. He talks about how best to share code and resources, abstract out much of the UI and UX differences, shows viable reusable usage of MVVM across platforms and nice techniques for putting together an almost automated build. (yes, that includes a way for you to compile you monotouch stuff on Visual Studio)
Best of all he has a available source code for the finished product and for a number of the major component individually placed in its own workshop project and a 50 + page pdf detailing the steps to do so.FlightsNorway on github
IMO the only thing missing is how best to handle local data storage across all platforms. In which case I would direct you to Vici Cool Storage an ORM that can work with WP7, MonoTouch and (while not officially supported) MonoDroid.
*Disclaimer* The site documentation isn't the most updated but the source code is available. (Because documentation is Kriptonite to many a programmer)
I think the easiest way to write the code once and have it work on all three platforms will probably be a web-based application. Check out Untappd for example.
You can start by looking at Robert Kozak's MonoTouch MVVM framework. It's just a start though.
MonoTouch MVVM
Are there any major advantages/disadvantages I should take into consideration when developing an app which and deciding whether to creates parts (styled menus, pages with content with complex layout etc.) in HTML/UIWebview or doing it all native?
I would like to hear people's experiences with this.
Personally, I find that I tend to dislike web apps that are (usually) disguised as iOS apps. I tend to notice a lot of inconsistencies between the UI of a web app and a 'native' app, and most of the time, it bothers me (my biggest pet peeve is tapping a button and seeing it highlight with a little translucent black box around it like a link). Now, I don't represent the major user demographic, which probably won't care, but that's my personal opinion.
In terms of programming, I've never written a web app before, but I assume that it's going to be slightly less structured than a native app just because writing HTML, Javascript, and CSS doesn't force you to assume a certain project structure, unlike iPhone apps that have distinct views, controllers, and the like. Depending on what you want to write, this might be liberating, but can also get tangled very quickly.
As middaparka said, you can also use a mixture of the two systems if you'd like. I mean, I'm assuming you're just as good a web developer as you are an iOS developer. If you are stronger in one suit than the other, then I say that you should lean towards heading in that direction. I'd much rather see an excellently written web app than a badly written native app, and vice versa.
I suspect the major advantages/disadvantages relate to the user experience - a "native" UIKit based user interface will feel a lot more natural than manipulating items within a web view. (It'll also mean you can use more "standard" components like navigation controllers, tab bars, etc.)
That said, there's no reason not to use a mix of the two, with the main UI being implemented via the various UIKit objects and the content being provided via a web view.
I would also add that the biggest issue I've found with hybrid frameworks is that you add another dependency to your app.
For example, take a big iOS update. If your chosen framework breaks, your app breaks and you won't be able to fix it until the framework is fixed.
Also, right now there are many frameworks and you have to pray that the one you chose isn't flushed down the toilet or drops support for one of your target platforms.
Another issue is that in a web based app/component you are missing out on platform specific technologies and frameworks like core data, GCD (or any other threading model - which in web you might have do with e.g. Ajax),uitableview with caching etc.
Should you hit a wall when it comes to performance or storage,then you have many more options in the native framework.
I took the time to set up some Unit Tests and set up the targets in XCode, etc., and they're pretty useful for a few classes. However:
I want to test small UI pieces for which I don't want to launch the entire application. There is no concept of pass/fail: I need to "see" the pieces, and I can make dummy instances of all the relevant classes to do this. My question is: how can I set this up in XCode?
I realize I could use another XCode project for each class (or groups of classes), but that seems a bit cumbersome. Another target for each?
I know that you're looking for an approach to testing UI components that doesn't require a fully functional application, but I've been impressed with what the new UI Automation instrument introduced in iOS 4.0 lets you do.
This instrument lets you use Javascript scripts to interactively test your application's interface, and it does so in a way that does not require checking exact pixel values or positions on a screen. It uses the built-in accessibility hooks present in the system for VoiceOver to identify and interact with components.
Using this instrument, I have been able to script tests that fully exercise my application as a user would interact with it, as well as ones that hammer on particular areas and look for subtle memory buildups.
The documentation on this part of Instruments is a little sparse, but I recently taught a class covering the subject for which the video is available on iTunes U for free (look for the Testing class in the Fall semester). My course notes (in VoodooPad format) cover this as well. I also highly recommend watching the WWDC 2010 video session 306 - "Automating User Interface Testing with Instruments".
Well, you cannot call showing a piece of some GUI a testing even if that GUI is a part of a large application. What you can do here is create a separate executable target and write a small tool that reuses GUI components from your application and shows them to you basing on input parameters. This will eliminate the need for many many different targets.
If you still insist on using unit tests, you can show your GUI for some period of time, for example, 10 seconds. So the test case will run until GUI is closed or timeout elapses and each test will take up to N seconds to execute.
This is a good question. I think you actually do not want to use unit tests for those 'visual confirmations'. Personally I usually write little test apps to do this kind of testing or development. I don't like separate targets in the same project so I usually just create a test project next to the original one and then reference those classes and resources using relative paths. Less clutter. And it is really nice to be able to test more complex user interface elements in their own little test environment.
I would take a two-level approach to UI "unit testing":
lthough Cocoa/CocoaTouch are still closer to the Model-View-Controller than the Model-View-ViewModel paradigm, you can gain much of the testability advantage by breaking your "View" into a "view model" and a "presenter" view (note that this is somewhat along the lines of the NSView/NSCell pair; Cocoa engineers had this one a long time ago). If the view is a simple presentation layer, than you can test behavior of the view by unit testing the "view model".
To test the drawing/rendering of your views, you will have to either do human testing or do rendering/pixel-based tests. Google's Toolbox for Mac has several tools for doing pixel-by-pixel comparison of rendered NSViews, CALayers, UIViews, etc. I've written a tool for the Core Plot project to make dealing with the test failures and merging the reference files back into your unit test bundle a little easier.
Is there any reason to not write iphone apps without useing the interface builder?
(or in other words, is it ok to write apps without the builder?)
Personally, my applications use no NIBs within them, but that's more of a matter of how I started doing development than anything else. I transitioned over from doing Mac development (where I use Interface Builder almost every day) to iPhone from when the first beta SDKs were released. Initially, there was no Interface Builder, and even when it came you couldn't do a lot of things with it, so I never took the time to really get to know it on the iPhone. It's more a matter of me doing what I'm familiar with.
Jeff LaMarche makes a convincing argument in his article "Don't Fear the Interface Builder" for you to use Interface Builder wherever you can, and I encourage new developers to learn to use it first before dropping down to programmatic user interface generation. It saves you a tremendous amount of time for interfaces using standard elements.
Some people have argued that there is a performance benefit to be had using purely programmatic interfaces, but Matt Gallagher ran a series of benchmarks and found that this speedup is only typically on the order of 5-10%. If you really want to shave that last bit off of your application's startup time, you might be able to have the best of both worlds with Adrian Kosmaczewski's nib2objc, which generates Objective-C from your NIB files.
However, there are plenty of times that you'll need to manipulate interfaces programmatically, such as for custom views and animations. This code can exist in parallel with Interface Builder without too much confusion. Again, it's more of a matter of personal preference at this point, but my recommendation is to use Interface Builder due to the time it can save you.
I've never written an iPhone app that uses Interface Builder (.xib files), but that's just personal taste: I like applications to be 100% code.
The reason is that I don't like applications that require design-time tools if you need to change something later on. It creates a dependency that may not be a problem today or next month, but it can become a problem in 3 years time.
So, the answer is: yes, it's fine to write iPhone apps without using Interface Builder.
Sure, it's absolutely fine to write apps without IB. It takes a little bit more setup (I believe there are some modifications you have to make to your Info.plist file), but it's certainly possible, and people do it all the time.
Personally, I prefer using Interface Builder for most tasks, but usually just to get the basic layout in place (so I don't have to deal with calculating rects, etc). Any further customization I prefer to do in code.
You can edit .XIB files by hand if you want to. They're XML, after all. Can't help having at least one of them in the project. Alternatively, you can create all your controls from code. The latter takes less typing, as far as I can tell.
Then, there are some apps where a XIB file would be of no use. I'm talking about games, where artistic/design considerations beat the convenience of having native widgets.
So yes, it's OK on both design level (no native widgets) and implementation level (yes native widgets, but sans IB).