That is what I suppose to have. UIViewController with a dynamic number of draggable UIViews.
The cases that should be covered is:
When user start to drag and than in some moment take his finger off, if UIView is in "place to drop" area than it should be there, if not, then it should be turned back where it was.
2.If user draged UIView3 to " place to drop", Than UIView4 should relocate on place UIView3.
Is there any tutorials how to implement that ?
Have u any ideas ?
You may check the DragKit. It's open source, so you may explore the logic and technic too.
As your views seems to be placed in grid, you may also check the AQGridView. Also an open source project, BTW. And it contains the Drag'n'Drop example.
Related
In IB I have quite a few views that are shown. Many of them are hidden when the app loads, but are shown later when buttons are pressed. This is all fine, but when building this layout in IB it is extremely difficult to layout anything because there are so many overlapping views, some of which are partially transparent (ones that are set to hidden) and other are completely overlapping and covering others. This makes layout very hard.
What is the best method when laying out lots of views like this? Is there another way to break things up? Or better yet, can I hide a a view completely (like in photoshop) so that I can edit the ones underneath, then turn that layer back on?
Another option when trying to select a view that is obscured by another is the shortcut:
'ctrl' + 'shift' and click
It displays a list of all the views under the cursor.
I'm not aware of any way to hide objects in the canvas, but a useful trick for complex layouts is to double-click an item in the document tree to the left - this selects the item and puts focus on the canvas, you can the use the cursor keys to nudge it about.
This doesnt solve the problem of not being able to see things because there are, for example, five or six labels occupying the same space, but if that is the situation it may be a better idea to have a single label and change its contents in code.
I ran into this issue for an app I'm building that has an arial-view image of a park with clickable hotspots. When a hotspot is clicked a popup UIview is displayed with information about that spot in the park. I use the same VC/XIB for three parks. This makes the XIB really busy and hard to work with (i.e the same issue that you have) The detail UIViews make it hard to work with the views underneath. My workaround was to pick each detailed UIView that was hiding the part of the XIB I wanted to work on, and add 1000 to the UIView origin.x in the size inspector. This moved those UIViews enough out of the way for me to do what I needed to with the XIB. Then when I was done, I moved them back by x 1000. (I just needed to move them out horizontally to do what I needed to)
I know its clunky but given that XCode does not have a convenient way to hide portions of an XIB - it was the quickest approach I could think of!
One approach to handling overlapping items in IB is:
Ensure the groups of items that you want to hide are grouped into Views.
Give these Views names: e.g. ViewOptionA, ViewOptionB and ViewOptionC.
Can do this by clicking on name of view in the tree while it is selected and then typing new name.
When you want to hide one of those groups of items:
a) Select the View by either:
i) Clicking on it in the tree at the left or
ii) Ctrl-Shift Clicking in the layout editor and then select the view from the list.
b) In the Attributes Inspector set Alpha to 0.
When you want to unhide one of those groups of items:
As for 2) but set Alpha back to 1
[You do need to remember to unhide all views before you publish!
If you are forgetful like me then perhaps you could subclass UIView and set Alpha to 1. I haven't tried this subclassing idea yet.]
In my iPad application there are many buttons (around 50), and I want to make a group box which contain buttons arranged by category.
I am looking for something like a C# or .NET GroupBox/Panel.
There is no Group Box / Panel Box in iPhone.
You need to manage by your self.
Use the UITableView to put all the button in on category.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/UIKit/Reference/UITableView_Class/Reference/Reference.html
It may be worthwhile to look into UIPopoverController views. These are the little popup views that appear when you click stuff. YOu could easily break your menu system into smaller parts with these.
You may draw a group panel by making two views. make a view of frame say 20,20,280,199 and then another one with frame 21,21,278,197. now put the 2nd view on the last one and change the color of last to some dark than later one. enjoy :)
remember that the should be in same hierarchy. that no one should be parent or child of any of these.
I have a problem. Part of my app requires text to be shown in a table. The text needs to be selectable/copyable (but not editable) and any URLs within the text need to be highlighted and and when tapped allow me to take that URL and open my embedded browser.
I have seen a couple of solutions that solve one of either of these problems, but not both.
Solution 1: Icon Factory's IFTweetLabel
The first solution I tried was to use the IFTweetLabel class made possible by Icon Factory and used in Twitterrific.
While this solution allows for links (or anything you can find with a regex) to be detected to be handled on a case by case basis, it doesn't allow for selecting and copying.
There is also an issue where if a URL is long enough to be wrapped, the button that the class overlays above the URL to make it interactive cannot wrap and draws off screen, looking very odd.
Solution 2: Use IFTweetLabel and handle copy manually
The second thing I tried was to keep IFTweetLabel in place to handle the links, but to implement the copying using a long-tap gesture, like how the SMS app handles it. This was just about working, but it doesn't allow for arbitrary selection of text, the whole text is copied, or none is copied at all... Pretty black and white.
Solution 3: UITextView
My third attempt was to add a UITextView as a subview of the table cell.
The only thing that this doesn't solve is the fact that detected URLs cannot be handled by me. The text view uses UIApplication's openURL: method which quits my app and launched Safari.
Also, as the table view can get quite large, the number of UITextViews added as subviews cause a noticeable performance drag on scrolling throughout the table, especially on iPhone 3G era devices (because of the creation, layout, compositing whenever a cell is scrolled on screen, etc).
So my question to all you knowledgeable folk out there is: What can I do?
Would a UIWebView be the best option? Aside from a performance drag, I think a webview would solve all the above issues, and if I remember correctly, back in the 2.0 days, the Apple documentation actually recommended web views where text formatting / hyperlinks were required.
Can anyone think of a way to achieve this without a performance drag?
Many thanks in advance to everyone who can help.
As soon as I hit the submit button, a new idea hit me.
I was so preoccupied with having URLs inline with text and interactive that I didn't consider that maybe it's not the best solution.
I'm certain that to achieve that kind of behaviour, a UIWebView is the best choice, regardless of the performance issues.
However, maybe a better user experience / interaction is to not highlight the URLs inline, but to gather them into an array behind the scenes, and present a disclosure button as the cell's accessory view?
Then for selection and copying text, I could just use the UITextView with data detectors turned off and not worry about the links being sent off to safari and closing my app.
When the disclosure button is tapped, the user could be whisked off to the URL found in the text, or if more than one URL is found, present the user with a picker view to choose which to go to.
Any thoughts/criticisms of this idea are welcome.
You can prevent a textfield from being edited by overriding the UITextField Delegate methods such that they do not apply any edits. That leaves the field selectable and copyable but prevents alteration.
A better question to ask is: do you actually have to display the actual URL itself? Can you get away with just a page/location name, just the server.host.domain prefix or some other condensed representation of the url? I don't think anyone whats to try to read a long url on a mobile's restricted screen.
If you do need to display the entire url then I think that a detail view is the way to go.
I would like to arrange UIControls in WPF in a similar way to the applications on the iPhone. They should be positioned on a grid, but a user should be able to drag them somewhere else, after releasing the mouse button (or the finger in case of an iPhone) the selected UIControl should snap back to the next position in the grid. The other UIElements should be rearranged automatically.
Further the user should also be connect two elements with a line or something.
I'm not experienced with WPF. The first question is if there is a container which is suitable for something (System.Windows.Controls.Grid ?) or if I have to extend canvas or somethig else for this.
I would like to know which elements from the WPF framework can be used and which elements I have to write myself.
For people who do not own an iPhone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3omhu2AUWC8
Update
I've looked at AnimatedTilePanel in the BangOTricks examples (see below), this one explains how to create your own Panel and how to let it arrange things there.. However I still need an idea how to implement drag and drop correctly in this example..
Unfortunately, you'll have to write a lot of things yourself, as WPF doesn't automatically do what you're looking for.
For positioning the controls, you can use either UniformGrid or Grid. Assuming it's much like the iPhone video you showed, you can just use the UniformGrid with 4 columns and however many rows you need.
For the dragging animation, layout-wise, you could start by manipulating the RenderTransform property on whatever is being dragged, but you'll have to set a handler to check once you've met whatever threshold necessary to move into the another "cell" -- and at that point, you'll have to changed the order of the items in the tree.
Take a look at AnimatedTilePanel from Kevin's Bag-o-Tricks at:
http://j832.com/bagotricks/
It doesn't do everything you want but it will show you how to write a panel that animates its children when changing size or order.
New input to this old post in 09. Earlier this year (2012) someone has wrote a FluidWrapPanel and open sourced it. I tried it and it works like a charm - just like that on the iPhone menu.
You can also apply to other UI Elements or UserControl.
Does anyone have any examples or resources where i might find information on scrolling text which is too long to display in a button control? I'm thinking something along these lines.
Display as much text will fit within the current rect with a '...' at the end to signify overflow.
Pause for say 1 second then slowly scroll the text to the right edge displaying the right part of the string.
Display as much text will fit within the current rect with a '...' at the beginning to signify overflow.
Start the whole thing over in reverse.
Is there an easy way to do this using the "core" or built in "animation" frameworks on a certain mobile device?
[edit]
Iwanted to add some more details as i think people are more focused on wether or not what i'm trying to accomplish is appropriate. The button is for the answers on a trivia game. It does not perform any speciffic UI function but is for displaying the answer. Apple themselves is doing this in their iQuiz trivia game on the iPod Nano and i think its a pretty elegant solution to answers that are longer than the width of my button.
In case its the '...' that is the difficult part of this. Lets say i removed this requirement. Could i have the label for the button be full sized but clipped to the client rect of the button and use some animation methods to scroll it within the clipping rect? This would give me almost the same effect minus the ellipses.
Here's an idea: instead of ellipses (...), use a gradient on each side, so the extra text fades away into the background color. Then you could do this with three CALayers: one for the text and two for fade effect.
The fade masks would just be rectangles with a gradient that goes from transparent to the background color. They should be positioned above the text layer. The text would be drawn on the text layer, and then you just animate it sliding back and forth in the manner you describe. You can create a CGPath object describing the path and add it to a CAKeyframeAnimation object which you add to the text layer.
As for whether you think this is "easy" depends on how well you know Core Animation, but I think once you learn the API you'll find this isn't too bad and would be worth the trouble.
Without wishing to be obtuse, maybe you should rethink your problem. A button should have a clear and predictable function. It's not a place to store and display text. Perhaps you could have a description show on screen with a nice standard button below?
Update with source code example:
Here is some ready to use source code example (actually a full zipped Xcode project with image and nib files and some source code), not for the iPhone, not using Core Animation, just using a couple of simple NSImages and a NSImageView. It is just a cheap hack, it does not implement the full functionality you requested (sorry, but I don't feel like writing your source code for you :-P), horrible code layout (hey, I just hacked this together within a couple of minutes, so you can't expect any better ;-)) and it's just a demonstration how this can be done. It can be done with Core Animation, too, but this approach is simpler. Composing the button animation into a NSImageView is not as nice as subclassing a NSView and directly paint to its context, but it's much simpler (I just wanted to hack together the simplest solution possible). It will also not scroll back once it scrolled all the way to the right. Therefor you just need another method to scroll back and start another NSTimer that fires 2 seconds after you drew the dots to the left.
Just open the project in Xcode and hit run, that's all there is to do. Then have a look at the source code. It's really not that complicated (however, you may have to reformat it first, the layout sucks).
Update because of comment to my answer:
If you don't use Apple UI elements at all, I fail to see the problem. In that case your button is not even a button, it's just a clickable View (NSView if you use Cocoa). You can just sub-class NSView as MyAnswerView and overwrite the paint method to paint into the view whatever you wish. Multiline text, scrolling text, 3D text animated, it's completely up to your imagination.
Here's an example, showing how someone subclassed NSView to create a complete custom control that does not exist by default. The control looks like this:
See the funny thing in the upper left corner? That is a control. Here's how it works:
I hate to say that, as it is no answer to your question, but "Don't do that!". Apple has guidelines how to implement a user interface. While you are free to ignore them, Apple users are used to have UIs following these guidelines and not following them will create applications that Apple users find ugly and little appealing.
Here are Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
Let me quote from there
Push Button Contents and Labeling
A push button always contains text, it
does not contain an image. If you need
to display an icon or other image on a
button, use instead a bevel button,
described in “Bevel Buttons.”
The label on a push button should be a
verb or verb phrase that describes the
action it performs—Save, Close, Print,
Delete, Change Password, and so on. If
a push button acts on a single
setting, label the button as
specifically as possible; “Choose
Picture…,” for example, is more
helpful than “Choose…” Because buttons
initiate an immediate action, it
shouldn’t be necessary to use “now”
(Scan Now, for example) in the label.
Push button labels should have
title-style capitalization, as
described in “Capitalization of
Interface Element Labels and Text.” If
the push button immediately opens
another window, dialog, or application
to perform its action, you can use an
ellipsis in the label. For example,
Mail preferences displays a push
button that includes an ellipsis
because it opens .Mac system
preferences, as shown in Figure 15-8.
Buttons should contain a single verb or a verb phrase, not answers to trivia game! If you have between 2 and 5 answers, you should use Radio Buttons to have the user select the answer and an OK button to have the user accept the answer. For more than 5 answers, you should consider a Pop-up Selector instead according to guidelines, though I guess that would be rather ugly in this case.
You could consider using a table with just one column, one row per answer and each cell being multiline if the answer is very long and needs to break. So the user selects a table row by clicking on it, which highlights the table cell and then clicks on an OK button to finish. Alternatively, you can directly continue, as soon as the user selects any table cell (but that way you take the user any chance to correct an accidental click). On the other hand, tables with multiline cells are rather rare on MacOS X. The iPhone uses some, but usually with very little text (at most two lines).
Pretty sure you can't do that using the standard API, certainly not with UILineBreakMode. In addition, the style guide says that an ellipsis indicates that the button when pressed will ask you for more information -for example Open File... will ask for the name of a file. Your proposed use of ellipsis violates this guideline.
You'd need some custom logic to implement the behaviour you describe, but I don't think it's the way to go anyway.
This is not a very good UI practice, but if you still want to do it, your best bet is to do so via a clickable div styled to look like a button.
Set the width of the div to an explicit value, and its overflow to hidden, then use a script executing on an interval to adjust the scrollLeft property of this div.