UITableView won't appear until a scrolling action - iphone

I have already made this kind of thing maybe one hundred times but, this time I'm so disturbed:
I have an UITableView with custom UITableViewCell which loads a picture via AFNetworking [-setImageWithURLRequest:]; and when I run the app, the content of the tableview doesn't appear.
If I wait, 8 seconds later, the content appears but if I made an interaction like scrolling, the content appears immediately. So strange.
I already tried to solve the issue with this article: http://blog.slaunchaman.com/2011/08/14/cocoa-touch-circumventing-uitableviewcell-redraw-issues-with-multithreading/ but without success.
Thank you.

Sounds like you are updating your table's contents off the main thread (UI thread), without seeing any code this would be my best guess.

Related

UITableView using UIRefreshControl either Won't Finish or has Flicker/Jump under iOS11

I have searched multiple discussions/examples for hours re UITableView using UIRefreshControl, and found most predate iOS11, and fall into one of two basic implementations, neither of which are working for me. Either I pull down and it won't finish (i.e., control slides with spinning wheel, and swiping up merely bounces it back down - yes, I'm using .endRefreshing); or it successfully completes but not before flashing large title on top of control (with original title still pulled down), and table cells jump up and down.
I am using Storyboard, and checking the enable box. I am placing the code in ViewDidLoad, and have tried declaring a custom var outside and inside ViewDidLoad (as well as not using one, but that seems incorrect). In ViewDidLoad, I have tried using tableView's .refreshControl, as well as .addSubview. In the selector func, I have tried placing .reloadData above and below .endRefreshing. Every variation produces one of the above two incorrect behaviors.
I am new to all of this, and completely frustrated, as all I'm trying to do is learn how to implement the feature on an iPhone. I saw a post stating UIRefreshControl does not work as of earlier this month, but I find it hard to believe that Apple would just leave this rudimentary and ubiquitous feature broken for weeks+. Can anyone please help? Thanks, and happy holidays!

Slow defaults access for key ClientState warning on iOS

I'm getting a "Slow defaults access for key ClientState took 0.034635 seconds, tolerance is 0.020000" warning when testing my iOS app - it seems to occur intermittently. I've tried to look around to see what it is about, but I'm not entirely sure! Any help appreciated, thanks.
My best guess is that the first Viewcontroller is taking to long to load.
I never got this message until adding a large background png to the first view controller which now exhibits the same behaviour but all the time. Take out the png and I did not get it on 5 loads.
Guessing same as depicus: first viewController loads too long.
In my case app starts by populating tableView from last saved CoreData. Right after that server tells me authorization has expired, I start re-auth and facebook login view comes on-screen - on top of tableView.
This is were I get that error. Without facebook login, everything is ok == fast enough.
SMSidat - I had the same problem and was looking found forever. I have an sqlite database and upon loading the vc that accessed the database it stated "slow defaults .....clientState took to long to load and all.
Try to remove Auto Layout from your nibs. Once I did that, no more "slow defaults...warning"!! Even though this is from 3 years ago...Hope it can help someone out.
Here is a link to the tread that helped me out
Slow UIViewController load time (slow ClientState warning)
In my experience this is cause by the time it takes to load a view when you invoke it. Take my case for example. I had a TabBar app and in one of my tabs it was a gallery. I was calling the view but within the view I was fetching everything on the main thread (big no no)... obviously, User interaction was gone out the window and the app will lock until done. The phone will take its time to load the images and to present the view. Once I multi-threaded my application and the pictures loaded in the background no more warning. Hope that helps, I am not sure how this warning works underneath but that changing this things got rid of it. :)

Improve UITableView scrolling performance while loading images

I have a scrolling grid of photos that looks and functions pretty much exactly like the photo picker on the iPhone. It is constructed from a UITableView that uses a custom UITableViewCell which displays a row of photos (very similar to how Three20 implements it).
It works great except that scrolling performance is poor. I'm already following most of the best practices for fast UITableView scrolling (à la Tweetie).
The images are all bundled with the app. I load them on the UI thread, on demand. I use UIImage's imageNamed: so that the images will be cached after they're first loaded. Once I've scrolled through the table view once, it scrolls very smoothly.
The problem is, the first time scrolling through the table view, scrolling is jittery. I've profiled the app and found that the majority of the time is spent loading the images from the file system. They are JPEG images, already sized correctly (small). I tried using PNG images instead, but performance doesn't improve very much.
The iPhone photo picker exhibits much better loading performance. I'm wondering if combining all the photos into a single image, which I load once and then split into smaller images would be faster. It certainly works in games, but I know that's really a totally different story. Has anyone had experience doing that?
Any other ideas for how I can improve performance?
Incidentally, I'm having a similar, albeit less, performance problem for another UITableView that just uses standard UITableViewCells with one image assigned to the imageView per row.
One thing to try could be pre-caching all the images when the view loads. Beyond that, perhaps loading the images in the background (even though it's loading from the filesystem and not the web). I haven't tried this myself, but perhaps you could use something like https://github.com/rs/SDWebImage and have the URLs point to the filesystem. Users might see some placeholder images at first, but then the UI wouldn't stutter while images are loading.
Setting the PagingEnabled property to off improves the scrolling performance.
I had a similar issue using a UITableView to display information parsed from an RSS Feed. I ran into scrolling performance issues when there was a significant amount of data. Though I'm still working on it I suspend the parsing when the table is being scrolled. It resumes when scrolling stops. I am not at my computer, but I believe I used tableViewDidScroll and tableViewDidEndDecelerating. You can check these tableview delegates. In any case it works very well, I just need a more elegant way to pause my parsing.
Fantastic. That does work like a charm! So efficiently I ended up using insertRowAtIndexPath rather that reloading the table. Now it behaves the way it
Thanks so much!
Joe

Bubble Chat + Emoticon + UITableViewCell

This is a question for iPhone development and I'm hopin someone can point me to the right direction on how i should go about implementing this.
I am trying to write a chat application that supports emoticons/smileys. Where the smiley/emoticon images are stored can be figured out later. I think few iphone applications out there are already doing this (i.e. skype + ebuddy(?)) but not sure what method they went for.
After searching around, there seems to be a few ways of doing this (i think):
bubble chat style which has been discussed before. UITableViewController with custom UITableViewCell. For emoticons, might have to do a whole bunch of calculations to determine where to stick a UIImageView for each emoticon.
Use UIWebView as the whole "window". Style it to look like bubble chat. Takes away any manual calculations on image smiley placements.
I have no idea what the performance is like for each of these two methods, how complex it can get etc, so any comments and guidance will help for sure. Cheers
If you use custom UITableViewCell, then I'd probably implement drawRect: instead of adding labels and images. One will probably take as long to implement as the other, but it will perform much better.
The UIWebView might be worth a short, although you will have to make sure that everything looks right there, too. Instead of using one big web page, I suggest simply throwing in a web view into each table view cell.
Personally I prefer the first approach, measuring and layout of text is not too complicated, but then I've never been the ultimate HTML guru.
I agree with #Eiko on making custom UITableViewCells, especially using drawRect instead of adding labels, images, etc.
If you used a UIWebView how would you handle updating it? A complete reload each time new text is sent? That seems like it will be a cause of issues. Once you get a long conversation reloading the entire UIWebView's contents will cause some flickering which isn't acceptable in my opinion. Also using a UIWebView would require you to have 2 complete copies of each conversation in memory. 1 as your backend data and 1 as the HTML. Where using a UITableView you have your backend data, and only enough of that will be duplicated that can fill 1 screen at a time.

Tableview lags, and glitches while scrolling due to images loading in each cell

Hey Guys! Me again! Can someone provide me with some example code of how to properly load images in a tablecell without making the tableview glitch while scrolling. For example if you look at fandago's app, when scrolling through their movies you can see that the image is loaded asynchronously so that the scroll isnt jumping, lagging, or glitchy. Thanks in advance. Right now I have the images loading just fine but it is glitchy as i scroll because the images are loading on main thread. I am creating an app very similar to fandango.
PS I am downloading these images via xml. (you know what i mean)
Thanks!!
Apple has an example of what you're looking for here: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/LazyTableImages/index.html