I'm trying to recreate the Camera.app buttons and interface from iOS in my own, custom camera application built on GPUFilter. Specifically talking about the Flash, Options, and front vs back camera button toggle that are across the top of the app:
Curious to know if these are built into Storyboards as UI objects or if there's another easy way to recreate these without totally reprogramming. I'm also interested in using the overlay table view that they use (in picture above) for options.
Thanks!
You can using AVCamCaptureManager and AVCamRecorder classes. Apple has a demo program build on its developer site here.
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What is the best way to create tutorial or help screens that can be viewed in an iPhone App on launch?
I'm debating between using two paradigms:
Edit a screenshot of the app with an image editing program to add static help text. Interaction is tapping or scrolling through the tips. This involves creating a custom UIViewController to advance to the next help screen.
Create a custom iPhone UIControl on top of the App user interface that can be tapped to advance to the next tutorial tip. The application will transition between the modes and will be active, rather than static. It involves adding hooks into the App's custom ViewController's to handle "TutorialUIControl" objects.
Here's some screenshots of the application that I need to make help screen UI for, it's an application that creates artwork. More App Information
Screenshot 1: View mode that allows viewers to scroll through an image list, like the UIImagePicker, but for custom image collections.
Screenshot 2: Action mode - allows viewers to select images to save to the "My Saved" album from the active art generation album "My Evolution" or evolve images using sexual/asexual image reproduction.
The "right" answer really depends on the application you are designing. I would highly suggest getting as many apps as you can and looking at how they do help. See what works and what doesn't and think about how that is related to your own design.
In my app (a game) I chose to build a set of static images that could be scrolled through to provide detailed help (based on Apple's sample code). But, I also built an interactive tutorial that plays the first time you run the game. I also pop up a welcome overlay the first time the app is run and suggest what button to press to start a game.
It also helps if you test your tutorial with a lot of different people. After several designs with things too complex, I boiled down my instructions to something extremely simple: "Press the green buttons", and then built up from there.
You can easily store a preference to say whether the app has been launched before, and if that entry is blank you run the tutorial again.
You can create an HTML tutorial that you view through a UIWebView. In on of my iPad apps, I just made a large image that I presented modally with images and text explaining how to use the app.
For iPhone, the best way to include a "How-To" tutorial for your app would have to be a web document, seeing as how you can add images and formatted text.
Alternatively, You can add more views to your controllers with transparent backgrounds and animated buttons and text, for a more interactive feel.
To answer my own questions many months later.
I revamped and used WEPopover to show my help popups, as seen in the iPhone/iPad App, Wallpaper Evolution Lite. The help disappears only if tapped or the button it was attached to was pressed. Using this flow I could highlight a series of buttons to the user.
I added help images within the application to highlight interaction behaviors with the content. The tap, zoom, and drag images are fully interactive.
As #WrightsCS mentioned HTML is another avenue. I use the UIWebView to provide a more in depth help/tips screen with contact information.
In my upcoming app, I'm making use of a paging UIScrollView with help content highlighting app features. The help screen is loaded on the first start of the app, and is accessible through a help menu option.
Here's my fork of the WEPopover github project: https://github.com/PaulSolt/WEPopover
A client of mine wants to show her "listing presentations" (she's a Realtor) to clients on her iPad. A Listing Presentation is normally a slideshow that shows how a Realtor can help the client.
She simply wants a slideshow that she can gesture from slide to slide, and perhaps a small button that allows her to email the slide or some information to the client on the spot.
What would be the best method to accomplish this? Flash Hack, Adobe AIR, Simple Appcelerator App, Native iPad App?
Thanks!
Create a native iPad app and modify the Three20 library for iPad, it has classes for slideshow viewer, retrieval of images from lists of URL's etc.
All you would need to do is change the xib files / code layout for the viewer class to take into account the larger iPad screen.
im new to ipad/iphone development. what are some ways to skin an ipad app? (eg: the notes app that came with the iPad) Is there any tutorials or code samples?
I think the question has to do with skinning your own apps instead of skinning Apple's pre-existing apps. Assuming this:
Any buttons can be easily skinned with images. Just add the image to your XCode project. Then, select the button in Interface Builder and in the attributes inspector you can choose the image there.
You can skin other views by adding UIImageView's that cover the whole view and then moving them into the background of the layout.
My app Rith uses all of the standard controls, but everything is skinned.
I have two of my apps rejected by Apple and sitting on the "shelves of approval" for 2 months, because both apps were using UIImagePickerController and I dared to add a rectangle on top of the UIImagePickerController, using something as
[picker.view addSubView:rectangle];
On the other hand, applications like CameraZoom and others, ditch the UIImagePickerController regular appearance completely and has its own interface, with custom graphics and sliders on top of the camera preview and even with the ability to zoom the preview image in real-time.
My question is: how can one do that and not be crucified by Apple?
thanks for any insight!
As far as I know, it's been hit and miss. Some apps get through, some don't, and it's really quite annoying (as is app approval in general).
In SDK 3.1, there is a new Camera Overlay concept, where you can overlay your own view on top of the camera view. You can find more documentation on the iPhone Developer website (since it is 3.1, it is under NDA).
can you use an image (previously created with Photoshop) to design your app ?
I mean connecting the psd objects to functions in app etc.
Kind of - you can create UIButtons, and set images as background. Then you can wire actions in your code to the button presses.
With the Briefs framework you can take a series of images and make a functional iPhone application from them by setting what happens when you tap on particular areas of the screen. While primarily intended for wireframes of applications, you could create a simple flashcard-style application from this.