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.
Related
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).
Good day! I'm using Parse for my swift project, Specifically the PFQueryTableViewController but i want to change the loading view when i open the app. It doesn't look good in my background so i want to change its color and shadow. Also its UIActivityIndicatorView. Is it possible to change this things? Here is the Screenshot for it.
I tried searching for that method in ParseUI framework but i can't find it. I hope you can help me, Thanks!
Only the table controller is unique to Parse. The spinner is just a regular UI element. Thus, the iOS developer references are good places to look for this.
Try this link for the activity spinner:
This link shows information about the controller, which shows that it simply inherits from UITableViewController, and the cells/background can be styled accordingly.
In general, Parse tries to prefix its objects with PF.
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.
I was wondering how to create a UITableView with editable components.
If you look at the network settings in the iphone, where you can enter the static ip address, etc.
How to do this ?
Thanks
http://furbo.org/2009/04/30/matt-gallagher-deserves-a-medal/
Check out that blog post. There's a link to some code named Generic Tables that will give you exactly what you need.
You may have to update some of the code to be 3.0 compatible, but that's just a case of updating the table cell init methods to use style instead of frame.
TaggedLocations project is a very good example of a UITableView with editable components.
You can see this example in Sample code library of Apple iOS:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/TaggedLocations/Introduction/Intro.html
Regards