Is there any way to customize the map annotation bubbles in Appcelerator Titanium? Specifically, I'd like them to be able to display more text than what they show (ideally, by expanding to fit the text). I know I can make them clickable and take the user to a page with more info, but I simply don't have enough information to warrant that. It's basically just the title text is too long (and I can't change the text itself, it comes from sources I have no control over).
Alternatively (if customizing what's there isn't an option), is there an easy way to do custom bubbles? I don't really want to have to reinvent the wheel and rewrite the pins themselves and their event handlers, but if it comes down to it (and someone can point me to some code that can get me started, since I know if it's required, someone's done it), then so be it.
iPhone-specific options are fine.
At this moment the latest Titanium SDK gives you such possibilities for annotation bubble customization:
Add subtitle for the bubble (subtitle option). You will see additional text under the title. On Android subtitle can be multiline (using '\n').
Add left and right view to the bubble (leftView\rightView options). You can add custom view to the left or right part of the bubble. And view can consist of different elements (label, image...).
Read more here.
If this is enough for your task - you can use it. But for deeper customization you must create your own view and show it on annotation click event.
Related
I need to highlight text in epub book,when user selects the text,i can get the text,what the user has selected,but i need to highlight,the text permanently what user selected,thanks,any help will ne appreciated.
There's nothing built in to iOS that will do this. Some broad techniques that might work:
If you're showing the book in a web view, you might be able to wrap that area in a span and style it to create a highlight.
If you're using Core Text, you could draw the highlight in directly, either before or after drawing the text. (Your choice will decide how the highlight affects non-black text.)
You could add a transparent view over the text that draws in the highlight.
As for adding highlight-related items to the selection menu, see this Stack Overflow post. You probably won't be able to get icons in the menu like Apple does, though; that seems to be a private API. You could probably override the whole menu system if you want something closer to Apple's look, but that'll be quite a bit of work.
I am building an iPhone app for a library and I want to give few options to the user to search books by. A user can search a book by title, author, topics, or date of publication.
What I want to know what's the best way to display these search options to the user? In terms of HTML, it would be easy - either use a drop down list or radio buttons. I tried using UIPickerView but honestly, that looks terribly ugly and destroys the aesthetics of the view of my app.
The other option I was thnking was using segmented control, but is it possible to have a vertical segment control in stead of horizontal one? The selection texts can be too long.
Any ideas?
If you want a vertical segmented control, you'll have to make it yourself. Create a textured image with dividers. I would export each section as a PNG separately. Then create a picture of each section with the "pressed down" gradient and export each segment as a separate PNG again.
I would then make a new class. If there is a specific number of objects in your segmented control or this is a one time thing, the class may not even be necessary. If not, then in the class constructor pass an array with the titles of the segments in your segmented control. For the first and last objects, use the pictures you made with rounded corners. For the objects in between, use the standard pictures. Then put the titles on top. When a segment is tapped (perhaps use hidden UIButtons), you can use a delegate method to tell the main search class which one was tapped, and then the class can replace the normal picture of that segment with the pressed down one.
Thanks for the options.
I ended up creating a simple table to show my choices.
User clicks on "search by", which opens up the table with options and then when you select any option, you return back to main view with the chosen search option.
I'm building a GWT app where I want to be able to detect when a user releases a scroll bar on one of my ScrollPanels.
My use case is that the horizontal scroll bar represents time. Since it's impossible to represent the full range of scrollable time I want to just represent a small window of time with the scroll bar. When the user moves and releases the scroll bar I want to do a smooth recentering where the new center is the release point.
I can work out how to do this by building a custom scroll bar widget, but I wanted to check if I was missing some way to do it using a "native" scroll bar first.
You might be able to do it with a ScrollPanel and implementing your own ScrollHandler. Just use the addScrollHandler() method and you should be able to override whatever functionality you need.
However, I would suggest that you re-think your approach. What you seem to really want is a slider control for time, that kind of looks like a scroll bar. You should check out the Composite class and the Widget Gallery to see if there is some combination of Widgets that would suit what you need more. Failing that, I'd also look at SmartGWT. They have a very extensive library of GUI Widgets available, and you may find something you can use already there.
We are trying to write a training manual application for the iPhone. On the top half of the screen is a diagram of a car engine, on the bottom half is some text. At the user repeatedly hits a "next" button, we highlight different parts of the engine, and in concert we highlight different parts of the descriptive text below.
We basically want "living text" in the text half, with the illustration following along on top to where the reader is in the text. What we'd like from the text is 1. user can scroll it using their thumb so possibly a UIScrollView 2. the software can explicitly drive a scroll to any part of the text (when they hit the "next" button). 3. the words in the text are interspersed with hotlinks e.g. "this is the camshaft... this is the piston..." and the user should be able to click on any of the keywords like camshaft, piston, and have the diagram highlight that. (The problem is not highlighting the diagram, its capturing the click). The text would have 300~400 buttons/links/keywords and about 600 words of text.
Since this is fairly similar to using a web browser, we tried using Apple's version of webkit using a UIWebView and handleOpenURL to register a service back to the app itself. But Webkit for internal links a popup comes up asking permission to access that link. Every single the user wants to go to a link (in our case just an internal event that we'd intercept so that we can highlight e.g. the camshaft). Tried to intercept the event from the HTML view, but that didn't work.
It seems like the best we can do is to abandon scrolling text, and make the text part more like flash cards or a power point presentation, breaking the text into custom UIViewCells with buttons inside a UIScrollView. However, this would impose an annoying constraint on the author that they would have to write everything to fit in the UIViewCells, sort of chunky.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
This is definitely something you can use a UIWebView for. Don't use handleOpenURL, rather, set your viewController as the webview's delegate, and override -webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:. When this gets called, check the request, and pull out your link data from there.
It would probably be easier to implement that completely in JavaScript in the document you load in a UIWebView. You would have to use JavaScript (i.e. [UIWebView stringbyevaluatingjavascriptfromstring:]) anyway to achieve things like scrolling to a certain position.
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.