For the iPhone 5.0 (ARC) I am getting lot of image(image url's) and text data from server in a json form. My requirement is to load the first five images from the server and when the user scrolls down the next five images load and so on. I need to show it in a UITableViewCell. By doing this I can reduce the network calls and make the application faster on the device.
Currently, I am using a background thread to load images, but they continuously load in the background. I don't want to do it like this.
I strongly encourage you to use the AFNetworking framework (that is really great and complete for all network-related tasks).
It comes with a category on UIImageView that allows you to set the UIImageView's image directly from an NSURL, managing everything for you in the background, like downloading the image or fetching it from its cache, cancelling the request if you change the URL later to avoid useless requests, etc.
Then in your tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: you can simply write this kind of code:
[cell.imageView setImageWithURL:yourURL];
And you're done. It will work even when the recycling mechanism of the UITableView is in action when you scroll, which would be quite a pain to manage using other methods.
Take a look at SDWebImage. It's a really neat library to download images asynchronously and also caches them.
Related
I get the text form the sever like this:
test_abc
http://www.xxx.a.jpg
test_aaa
http://www.xxx.b.jpg
test_ccc
I want to split the string to ["test_abc", "http://www.xxx.a.jpg", "test_aaa", "http://www.xxx.b.jpg", "test_ccc"] and then display them in a UITableViewCell,before the images will be downloaded, I used a LoadingIndicator as placeholder, when the images will be downloaded, display the images and modify the height of the cell to display the whole images.
Can someone help me do this?
Try looking into Three20
An open source library written by the guy who wrote the official "Facebook" app for iOS. Moreover, the code of the facebook app is based on that library.
You may use SDWebImage, and you don't have to worry about cache, etc..
Web Image
This library provides a category for UIImageVIew with support for remote images coming from the web.
It provides:
An UIImageView category adding web image and cache management to the Cocoa Touch framework
An asynchronous image downloader
An asynchronous memory + disk image caching with automatic cache expiration handling
A guarantee that the same URL won't be downloaded several times
A guarantee that bogus URLs won't be retried again and again
Performances!
I am downloading images from web in uitableview and want to save in document directory. I am downloading syncronously. I downloaded and saved in document directory successfully, but when i scroll uitable every time images are being saved , i want to save images at the time of downloading only once. What should i do? Can anybody provide me some code? Any help will be appreciated.
You should never use synchronous download. It will block your UI, make your UITableView scrolling lag, make the user think your app has frozen... Very bad idea.
You should instead always use asynchronous download using NSURLConnection's loadRequest: method and implementing the delegate methods yourself (even probably dedicate a class to manage the download, as everybody do)
See the LazyTableImages sample code from Apple Documentation, it explains how to load images asychronously to display them in a TableView, loading them on demand, and avoiding to freeze the UI.
Never do blocking operations in the delegate methods of UITableView like tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: (and I hope you use the reuse-mechanism of UITableViewCells correctly too, to reduce cell allocations. See the TableView Programming Guide about this point)
Once you have implemented the asynchronous download using NSURLConnection and its delegate methods, its a piece of cake to move the code that saves the images in the documents folder in the connectionDidFinishLoading: delegate method (thus saving them only once and only when they are downloaded)
Do the saving of images in didConnectionFinishLoading method. You can also use an NSNotification for this, to know when the download is getting completed.
Hope this information is useful.
That may seem like a broad question, but I'm talking specifically here about apps that display a lot of content (image plus some text) pulled from the net in separate cells, rows, etc. And where each of those cells can get loaded asynchronously (independently from all the others).
So for example, for iOS, is it too inefficient to use uiwebview for each of these cells? It seems like this would be a simple approach, but I'm not sure about the performance. "Pulse" has a bunch of cells on the page at one time, and on iPad this could really get to a large number. Is it better to do this using lower level techniques, or is using UIWebView a decent choice?
Update:Clarification-->
Just to clarify, I understand that the typical approach is to use UITableView and then create table cells to hold and show the data (although the "Pulse" UI may be more involved). What I'm getting at here is if those UITableViewCells could hold UIWebViews? So instead of putting a UIImageView and a UITextView in each cell and so forth, if it makes sense to just put UIWebViews there instead, and give them URLs (could pass a param to indicated the row) to load as cellForRowAtIndexPath is called or something.
Well, if you talk about the YouTube app, its not UIWebview. The common and better approach is to use UITableViews along with the custom UITableCells. As far as asynchronous loading of images is the concern, we implement "Lazy Loading" mechanism. And in this way, we are able to keep the performance benefit of native UIView intact. Whereas, in UIWebView, you would need to design the iphone based webpages which will cost you learn about Dashcode tool, or may be someother opensource css library, etc.
In short, UITableView, with Custom UITableCells, along with Lazy Loading Mechanism (achieved by some Threading Techniques) will do all the Magic for you.
Hope this answer will give you some better idea....
Do not use UIWebViews with UITableViews like that. There are far too many moving parts for a UITableView!
I wrote the NYTimes iPhone app while I worked there. I only ever used a UIwebView to display article content. This is because NYT articles and log post layout is extremely complicated and impracticle to replicate programmatically. (I did override some of the CSS in app)
The UITableView is a super high performance implementation for butter smooth high speed scrolling. UIWebViews are the opposite of that: heavy, slow and memory intensive. In fact web views actually run internal virtual machines and threads (for JavaScript, rendering, etc).
Keep in mind that table view cells are recycled very aggressively. The instant a cell scrolls off screen bottom it will, in gneral, be immediately reconfigured for use as the new cell that scrolls in from the top.
With a UITableView, you need to create VERY highly optimized custom UITableViewCells. The data displayed in the cells should be cached aggressively by you so that you don't need to recompute it or perform intensive layout calculations. Uncacheable information such as remote images should be loaded asynchronously (which might mean they show up much later).
On caching:
The NYT apps have a high performance caching system for images. The trick is to request the imge data as soon as its "needed", but to also preempt downloading images which were needed a second ago, but no longer. You also don't want to cancel partially downloaded images because that wastes the already consumed bandwidth. Check out NSOperationQueue. It has most of the levers needed to build such a system.
Another note: consider building a web app if your project may also be accessed via web or an android app.
I have a table view with all cells having the UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle,
the images of all the cells are got from the server.
However, those images are not changed frequently.
Someone can show me how to improve the user experience? Each time, user scroll down the table, it seems that it goes online to check and download images again.
Or at least, show me some options that are available to achieve the goal.
Thanks,
The Three20 library has an ImageView subclass that accepts a URL to your remote image and uses the excellent TTURLRequest/Caching mechanism to fetch images. It maintains an in-memory and on-disk cache and will only download images if they are not cached or have expired. You can configure the default cache-expiration time or use a value from your HTTP response. If you use the TTTableViewController subclass and the appropriate TTTableItem subclass, you will get the appropriate image downloading behavior for free. However, it is not necessary to use every three component to do what you need. If you're integrating into existing code, you could create your own UITableViewCell subclass that uses a TTImageView instead of the standard UIImageView. Then, in your cell configuration methods, you can set a default placeholder image and a URL to load and it will pretty much take care of the rest. As a performance optimization, you should also implement the UIScrollView delegate methods in your tableview controller to suspend the TTURLRequestQueue during scrolling (take a look at the TTTableViewController to see how this is done).
You could try one of the following
Create an dictionary and cache all the fetched images in it using the image name as the key
Cache and reuse the entire UITableView cells in tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:
If it is just one image repeating load it one outside tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:
You write that the images change on a monthly basis - you could save the images to disk as they are used and just either check if the images have changed on the back burner or at a given daily interval redownload the images. Brian Chapados reply seems interesting .
Depending on your code there is probably a ton of other ways to improve image loading. Hope that helps...
I'm making a simple rss reader for the iPhone. The feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/foksuk/gLTI) contains a reference to images that I want to show in my TableView.
By default, as far as I understand, the iPhone only tries to load images when they are needed: it will only load the images for the rows that are displayed. Only when the user scrolls down, it will start loading the ones that need to be displayed. Right?
Now, since the images are downloaded from the web (they are not too large, but still), the scrolling of my TableView is stuttering. This is in the emulator, so on the device itself it will only be worse.
Luckily, this specific feed only lists the latest 12 entries of the blog. So I guess I should be able to first download an cache all the images, so they can be loaded from the memory, rather than from the URL.
What is the proper approach here?
I had the same problem, where my TableView would have to download each image before it displayed the cell. Like you say, it causes a big slowdown in the scrolling speed. What you need to do is download the images in the background and then insert them into the cell when they're finished downloading. This is how the app store app does it.
This post has all you need to know, including a class file you can use straight away:
http://www.markj.net/iphone-asynchronous-table-image/