What would be the easiest way to graph a line graph on a iOS app? I am building a iOS app that needs a line graph I don't need anything complex just something that will graph a int.
I have seen core graph but not sure if thats the way to go.
You're probably thinking of core-plot, which would be a fine solution if you want something that has a lot of features and is ready out of the box.
If you want something more minimal, you could create your own line graph UIView subclass very easily and make it do exactly what you want. Building a general-purpose graph library is a lot of work because there are so many ways that people like to vary their graphs. If you know exactly what you want and don't need something more flexible, rolling your own can be a quick and effective solution.
If you do decide to roll your own, Matt Gallagher's Cocoa With Love blog has a number of very good graphics entries to get you started.
Apple's Accelerometer sample app (on their iOS Developer Center web site) includes some example code for a simple line graph.
Nuclios http://www.infragistics.com/products/ios/ is a pre-built library that has a bunch of graphing styles. It's not free but I don't think the license fee is outrageous either ~$250
You could take a look at BEMSimpleLineGraph.
It's modeled after UITableView and offers a wide range of features.
Related
I am using Core Plot for a little App I am programming at the moment and I was wondering if there are any good looking examples or resources. With good looking I don't mean the google docs Example App ;)
Core Plot includes a number of example apps that demonstrate various features. There is also wiki page on the Core Plot site with links to many apps that use it.
I am not sure that what are you looking for as you have not cleared your question. But i am telling you this link: http://www.johnwordsworth.com/2011/10/adding-charts-to-your-iphone-ipad-app-using-core-plot/ which certainly will help you.
I've done a bit of iPhone development (3 apps in the appstore currently) but the interface has been pretty plain. I've used the stock components for the most part (UITableViewController, etc.) with a little bit of customization, but for the most part everything looks pretty generic. I'd like to get started developing apps with a richer user interface, but haven't found any good resources to get me started.
What resources have you all come across that outline how to create more advanced iOS interfaces (both iPhone and iPad)? Books? Blog entries? Just looking at the apps I have installed right now, some of the interfaces I've been very impressed with are the ESPN Score Center, XFINITY TV, Facebook, etc.
What about 3rd party interface component libraries? Are there any you recommend that provide more advanced interface components than those in the stock iOS library?
I'd love to take a look at any resources that you recommend for getting started.
I love Ray Wenderlich's tutorials. He's got one on Core Graphics which allows you to draw your own Table Views with headers, buttons, and bezier-curved footers!
Here's a little secret that often gets overlooked: a lot of the cool UI elements you see are stock Apple elements that have been customised to the brink of no return.
The main reason for this is Apple have put a lot of time and effort into making components that just plain work. A UIScrollView, for example, has had many more combined hours of testing than any app you write could hope to achieve.
The trick is to know exactly how to customise elements. A UITabBar is a good example: I've seen several apps that use their own custom tab bars. The problem is, often they don't handle edge cases particularly well. You might have issues if somebody tries to hit two items at the same time (I've actually seen an app that used their own implementation of a tab-bar crash if you pressed two items at the same time).
But if you use Apple's UITabBarController and either subclass, categorise, or otherwise overload it to get the customisation you want, you get a lot of the low-level event handling stuff for free.
You would be amazed with what you can do with a UITableViewController, and you get things like view recycling for free (some of the apps I've worked on have things like independent cell resizing, customised animation of cells, horizontal implementations of a tableview, etc).
Not a particularly useful answer, I grant you, but the point I want to get across here is once you've designed your kick-ass UI step back and consider what can be achieved with the existing toolset before rolling your own. You'll thank me when you come to bug fixing!
I also like Three20. Until now I didn't use it in my projects, but I played with it. And there's some really cool stuff in it. ;-) I think that's one way to extend your standard User Interfaces.
Another really cool part is designing your own elements. I like this really. Because you then have in your App something nobody else has. :-D
I've started looking into using Opacity for Mac, it's a pretty neat desktop application where you can generate your own graphical elements (buttons, switches, icons, etc) and then automatically generate the CocoaTouch / Quartz2D classes and headers to drop in your app ... Some elements work best when they're natively drawn on the device, rather than stored/loaded as pngs, or whatever. Moreover, you get #2x Retina display support for free. While not an interface dress-up framework, the fact that it generates Quartz2D code for you makes this a real contender for anyone who's remotely graphically creative but short on complex 2D programming skills.
Speaking of beautiful interfaces, if you're looking for inspiration or actual graphical elements to put in your interface, I frequently get some great ideas at 365psd ... they actually provide the Photoshop documents to reproduce some eye dropping UI goods, for FREE. Some places may just give you a PNG, but this does little good if you want to scale it (#2x or iPad) or customize it to fit your needs. It's like open source for graphical UI design.
I was wondering if anyone knew of a simple way to implement graphing in an iPhone/iPad application. I've spent quite a bit of time googling and can't seem to find any sort of a solution. Maybe I'm just searching with the wrong terms since a lot of consumers are asking about "graphing" in terms of using their applications, not developing them, the search-space is rather polluted.
It seems like a lot of iPad/iPhone applications have embedded graphs... and I can't imagine that every developer has invented their own graphing engine from the ground up. Or, maybe they have... Does anyone have any suggestions?
Core Plot is one popular option.
I have herd wonders about core plot but for myself i wrote a graph View Class which creates a standard graph.
Have a look
http://sebkade.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/basic-graph-class-for-iphone/
hope it helps
From my experience graphs are best done through UIWebView's and then written in HTML/JavaScript - there are many great html/javascript libraries for graphings. Personally, I like
http://www.highcharts.com
but these exist as well.
http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/charts
https://developers.google.com/chart/
http://www.zingchart.com/#welcome
How do you design a UI like Facebook?
Is it hard to implement a custom skin into a iphone app? How is it done?
Do I need to follow apple's guideline? What if I don't want to?
How do you design a UI like Facebook?
Facebook's iPhone app appears to be built around using UITableView in various guises. It looks like it adheres to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
Is it hard to implement a custom skin
into a iphone app? How is it done?
Skins are just graphic elements that are designed to have their image components swapped out. They are not difficult to implement.
Do I need to follow apple's guideline?
What if I dont want to?
Apple will not penalize you for a non-standard interface. The only interface restrictions are (1) some issues of obscene content and (2) you can't create the illusion that the device itself is broken, has crashed or otherwise failed.
A bit of advice. Don't use non-standard interfaces.
Good interfaces are almost by definition standardized so that users don't have to think about them. Novel interfaces slow users down even if they have no problems otherwise. Just try switching rapidly between Mac, Windows and Linux sometimes. None of the interfaces has major problems per se but having to stop and think how to do something in each particular interface is a pain. You can create the same problem by using a good but non-standard interface within an app.
That is assuming of course that you can actually create a good interface. There are far, far more ways to make bad interfaces than there are to make good ones. Most interfaces fail even those designed by interface gods. The standardized interfaces are the result of tens of thousands of hours of testing and years of experience. You're unlikely to whip out something really new and useful your first time out.
If you try something novel I suggest you mock it up first and then test let people test it without giving them any instruction. You'd be surprised how complex it can get. We used to just make photoshop mockups and then ask test users what they thought each element did or which element they would choose to accomplish a particular task. We were surprised at how poorly our (the developers) perception of the interface overlapped with the perception of the users.
In sum, a novel interface is more likely to hurt your app than help it.
With regard to how to build an app like Facebook, check out Three20. In particular, the TTLauncherView is the class that implements the Springboard-like grid of icons.
3- You don't need to follow the AHIG. But be careful if you don't, because it's very easy to go wrong doing so. Users like to not have to learn anything new. They know the typical Apple software UI, so if you use it, users will know how to use your app as soon as they buy it. If you don't use it, it is important to make sure that the UI is exceedingly easy and intuitive, and looks good to an iPhone user's eyes (and fingers).
I wonder if every developer would have to code statistic visualization by him/herself, or if there's a lib already that can be used to draw charts, curves, stats, etc. (like in the stock app for example)?
Take a look at this graphing package, it will also compile on the iPhone:
http://www.mpkju.fr/~graphview/page1/page1.html
Note that I've not used it yet, I ran across it before and made a note of the potential usefulness of it.
You might use the Google Charts API, and just use the images that come back from that:
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
For instance, you can retrieve the bytes from this URL
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World
and insert them into an NSImage, or just let the web view do the rendering for you.
Core Plot is a cross-platform (Mac / iPhone) plotting framework being developed by a group of scientifically-minded Cocoa developers. It is based on Core Animation, and was advancing quite quickly the last time I checked in. You might want to read the mailing list archives to get an idea of the design goals and current state of the framework.