Animated Loading Screen - iphone

I'd like to have a splash screen with some image animation.
The image is of the letter 'N' which needs to be filled with a single color in a fashion that makes each line (out of the 3) fill on its turn.
Is there a more elegant way than using UIImageAnimation?
EDIT:
Take this image for example: http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/64282/64282,1224026572,14/stock-photo-christmas-green-snowflake-capital-letter-n-18910459.jpg
Think of that green filling as what needs to be animatedly filled.

You could use a CAShapeLayer to animate the drawing of text. I could give you an example, but to be honest Ole Begemann has an awesome example:
http://oleb.net/blog/2010/12/animating-drawing-of-cgpath-with-cashapelayer/

Related

Border around the image within an NSImageView

I have an NSImageView which contains an image. Is there a simple way to draw a border around just the image (which might be smaller than the NSImageView), and not the entire NSImageView?
[Answering my own question.]
On the off chance that someone comes cross this page looking to get something similar done, a simple way to do it is by using a wrapper view, and setting a border on the inner view.

Swift iOS UI Advice

I am looking for some general advice and maybe some example code of what I am trying to accomplish if anyone knows of any for an iOS swift project. I would like to either:
A) Make the background, of the blue view, gray and only show a certain percent of the blue area.
OR
B) Overlay the gray area on top of the blue view and just keep making gray area bigger.
What I am trying to do is simulate battery power and show a battery.
I've considered using a progress bar and doing option A, but the blue area is NOT a solid color. Its actually an image. I've tried using an image for the progress bar, but the image needs to keep its dimensions. (Ex: If progress shows 20% it needs to show only 20% of the image or "blue area", but if you use an image as the progress bar it just shrinks the image and still shows 100% of it instead of just the 20% I need to show).
You can easily write a custom self-drawing UIView that will behave in exactly the way you describe. In other words, you tell your UIView a percentage, and it redraws itself with the blue on the left and the gray on the right. You can even draw the darker gray stroke outline shown in your drawings. All easily accomplished in code.
I like being able to lay things out visually and take advantage of autolayout. Here's how I would do this (in a nib/storyboard):
Place a UIView on your canvas and give it the gray background. Give it whatever autolayout constraints are appropriate for you.
Place a UIView inside the one from #1 and give it the blue background. Anchor it's left, top, and bottom to the gray parent view and give it whatever width (doesn't matter).
Add an outlet to that width constraint you made in #2.
Now all you have to do is modify the "constant" property of that width constraint to give you the desired "progress". So if your gray view is 100 wide and you want to present "20%" progress, then just do "yourWidthConstraint.constant = 20".

How to add effects to UILabel

I've been searching for that many time ago and I can't find a solution. I have a animated label that crosses the screen of the iPhone (like the title of a song does in the Music app.Well, I'd like to add the "fade in/out" effect like the music app has. The easy solution is open Photoshop and create this simple image and then add it up to the label. Well, under the label I have an image with black backgroud. The image can be zoomed in and then the image with the fade in/out effect can be seen, and it doesn't look well. Is there any possibility to do this programatically? Thanks
PD: if there's another possibility rather than doing this programatically, I'll apreciate the answer as well.
Edit: Here's the image capture of the problem
I'll approach it in a non-programming way.
The image reference you gave us for the Music app you seem to be emulating has a different gradient than the one you drew in the second image.
If you notice in the image, the gradient has not fully completed its transition from clear to black before the words are cut off. I would say in photoshop run the gradient from clear to 80% alpha black and then draw a 100% alpha black rectangle to finish it off as per image. The white is just showing you what it looks like without the black background.
Now as for the zooming. Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you want a viewing window for the image so that once you have zoomed into it, it will fade to either side, but still be viewable/movable in the center. This means that the image has to be zoom-able, but once you have zoomed the "fade in/out" should not be zoom-able.
Just make sure you aren't scaling the fader by keeping it separate from the scrollView of your background image.

Iphone Set background image into text in uitextView?/

I have a uiimageView containing the text like this.
I want to set the image background of the text to look like this instead.
Please help me! Thanks!
You will need to combine an image of the text with the background image (the stuff that is supposed to fill the inside of the text) using compositing. Take a look at the various blend modes you can use, or look into the use of CIFilter.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Reference/CGContext/Reference/reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/c_ref/CGBlendMode
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/graphicsimaging/Reference/CoreImageFilterReference/Reference/reference.html
The thing in the background looks like it might be a gradient. Again, you can use a CIFilter to generate that gradient, or you can use Core Graphics. So you'll composite the drawn text with its fill image, then you'll draw that over a gradient.
instead of text in black solid color, make image with transparent text and outer region as the grey gradient you want and put this image over you background image, you will get the desired result.

Loupe Magnification with White Text & Clear Background on Iphone

You guys helped so much with my last question, I figured I'd give you a shot at another. I have written an app with a theme that uses a dark blue glassy background and white / gray text and labels. The textfields in my app have clearcolor backgrounds and white texts and everything shows up very well. My only concern is that when you hold down a touch in a text box to get the magnification loupe, of course the white text shows up on a white background... which you can not read. Anybody got any ideas on how to implement a usable loupe here?
Unfortunately, the only "public" way I know how to change the loupe background is by setting textField.backgroundColor
I assume that since you're setting your backgrounds as clearColor, the magnifier defaults to white background, so the only way is to set your backgroundColor as something not clear.
I'm also assuming that since you did mention that you set your backgrounds a clear, that having it not be clear is not an option. So two ways I can think up in my mind about how to get around this is:
Assuming that the magnification lopue gets its background color by calling the backgroundColor implementation (and not some other obscure private API method): override the backgroundColor method and return a solid color.
Create your own loupe (probably not feasible)
I figured out a simple work around that achieved the desired effect. I also went through the full process of making my own loupe but since there is clear documentation on making your own loupe (see kiyoshi's answer), and this other method is ridiculously simple, I decided to document it here. It is basically just faking the clear background so that the white text shows up in the loupe. The background I am using for the view looks like blue smoke on a darker blue background:
alt text http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/9835/beforestatex.jpg
I took a screenshot of the simulator with the textfield visible and a black background so it would show up better:
alt text http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/9023/blackfieldx.jpg
Then I took that screenshot and made it semi transparent in photoshop, and overlayed my original background image to find exactly where the textfield appeared on the background:
alt text http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/9493/transparencyfullscreenx.jpg
Then I copied the exact pixels that would be used as the background of the textfield into a new PNG and saved that and set it as the the background image:
alt text http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/3450/textboxback.png
forwardToField.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage: [UIImage imageNamed:#"textboxback.png"]];
Keep in mind that the image will be repeated as a pattern within the loupe... so if you don't want to see the edges, simply make sure your textfield is larger than the loupe height and width.
Before:
alt text http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/2672/beforex.jpg
After:
alt text http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/2182/afterxd.jpg
I hope this helps somebody out there!
Actually its pretty feasible to create your own loop. Haven't tried subitting to apple yet so don't know how they feel about it.
Basic idea is override touches, use a timer to see how long the user has been touching the screen. The loupe is just a UIView that grabs as an image the view behind it and magnifies it.
Check out this article from Craftymind here
The article has you cache the entire image behind which is definitely faster, for rendering the loupe, but if you have stuff (i.e. textFields) that are constantly changing I've been able to render the loope image real-time without too much of a performance hit.