When I was first learning Java, the JGoodies Look 'n' Feel seemed great, and the same thing is available for WPF in the form of WPF Themes and WPF Futures. Are the any such libraries for iOS with which I can skin my app? I seem to get iOS screenshots with anything I search for, but I'm looking for things like UITableView header backgrounds or tab bar backgrounds. Apps always seem more professional when they have nicer, custom control backgrounds.
A lot of developers create their own custom table cell interfaces in Interface Builder and load those as the cells for a Table View. This gives you many options and is fairly straightforward, and you can get something much more interesting than the stock table view appearances.
Related
I'm new to programming apps, trying to realize a project for iOs using xCode and swift.
As far as I've learned most people seem to work with the storyboard feature, but I've come across people that suggest to deactivate the storyboard and work with code only.
I'd like to know your opinion on what method fits my needs best for the intended project. As I am just getting started, I'd like to stick with the appropriate method right away for I'm probably going to invest a lot of time.
This is about what the app is going to look like:
myApp Layout
Now this is what it' basically supposed to do:
The "settings"-button (blue area, top left) is going to take you to a different view to set preferences. The "search"-button (blue area, top right) is going to change the title into a search field.
You can browse through 3 categories. Each of them contains a couple of questions. Those are stored in a database and are supposed to be displayed list style within the red area. The order of the questions is going to depend on the users preferences.
Clicking any of the questions is going to take you to another view that displays the answer. When viewing the answer the "settings"-button (blue area, top left) is changing to a "go back"-button.
Now as far as I've learned the blue area might be realized with a navigation controller, navigation bar.
The white section works pretty much like a toolbar. However I've read it's close to impossible to move the standard toolbar from the bottom to the top.
I've seen tutorials of people realizing this type of layout with (to me) complex code but without using the storyboard. Am I wasting time on figuring out how to manipulate storyboard objects? Coming from coding and programming websites the project looks so unbelievably simple. Is a project like this in fact rather complex to do as an app?
In any big project you will have to use all approaches, it is all about experience. For example, I am using StoryBoards to make 95% of my UIViewControllers elements, using XIB for static screens like error messages, some loadings etc. and using code to append some gradient views, shadows etc. It is possible that in future I will be doing all in a different way. But if you are a beginner - better use Storyboard, it makes getting into all of it much easier, understanding UIKit and iOS development overall.
So with websites on the web we use HTML, CSS and Javascript.
What do we actually use to build the UI for an IOS App?
Is there a CSS/HTML/JS equivalent use for building IOS Apps?
What is the most common way use to design, style the UI of an IOS App?
The reason I ask is because I'm spending longer than expected learning core graphics and would like to move on with the book I'm studying from. I was under the impression core graphics was used for styling of apps and it was like an IOS equivalent of CSS.
Hoping someone could help clear things up thanks.
Regards
In many cases, images are used for styling in iOS.
For simple things like just changing background and text colors, UIView and its subclasses have direct accessors.
For most things, you won't need core graphics just for styling purposes. It would be easier to help you if we knew more concretely what you want to achieve, though.
The closest thing to a CSS equivalent is appearance proxies, which allow you to specify things like "all instances of UITextField should look have this font, colors and shadow when contained inside a NavigationController". You can override this for specific instances by just setting the desired values on the instance.
What options do I have when creating menu with options (contextual menus). What is allowed and what does Apple provide?
I have a toolbar with buttons and a click of a button opens a menu with options:
Examples:
UIPopoverControllers are only available on iPads, but it's ok to create similar looking things for iPhone
What you see in the picture, is entirely custom. a UIView subclass likely. There are pretty much no limits to what you do with your UI, within reason, so no ugly highly contrasting primary/secondary colours, and it's best to keep it at least similar to the native UI. If you say use a windows 7 phone ui style in an iPhone app it's more likely to get rejected by Apple, than keeping to the style of iOS.
So make it look as "professional" as possible, using gradients and shadows, edge arrows, like in the above picture.
Apple provides pretty much nothing that your looking for,
Similar built-in widgets would be UIPopoverController (iPad-only) or UIActionSheet. I like your menu better though.
I would also recommend looking at the guidelines for such custom UI elements. I can not say what is 'allowed', but Apple is not shy about how your app should look/feel/function.
Towards the top of this link talks about toolbars, status bars, etc.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/UIElementGuidelines/UIElementGuidelines.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH13-SW1
I'm the programmatic guy, and I simply don't want to use Interface Builder. I feel out of control, and besides that my GUI is about 90% custom all the time.
Literally every book does everything in Interface Builder and claims that this is the one and only great way to have real MVC going on.
Example: One of those books mentions that programmatically creating an UINavigationController with an Root View Controller and everything else that belongs in there is a big mess and won't be reusable when porting to the iPad, while doing this in XIB is a clever decision. Then the port to iPad using UISplitViewController will be a simple task.
So when I make iPhone apps and want to port those to the iPad too, what strategies work to reuse as much code as possible? I'd like to learn more about how to separate my code and achieve a better overall architectural design without using Interface Builder.
For those who want to tell me I must go with IB: Again, I do a lot of custom UI where IB is often just in the way. And not to mention all the animations. I really have my reasons. For people who make default UI IB is really fine - but please, I don't want to start a fight for IB vs programmatical UI or default UI vs custom UI! It's all about how to achieve great reusable code when doing everything programmatically, and both have their pros and cons.
Although you did not ask for it, I feel compelled to make the case for why people in general (perhaps not you) should consider IB, and then address the issue of custom components.
I use a lot of animations and custom components. And I love to use IB...
The key is to use IB for its strengths, and then decide what to do with the rest from there. What then are the strongest points of IB? Connections, placement, auto-resizing and customizations.
Connections are linking aspects of views and controllers together. It's faster in IB to drag out a few connections to delegates or references, than it is to write the code that forms the connections. And, it's a quick place to review all links to the UI you are building.
Placement IB also does well at. There's a fair amount of code involved in setting up any GGRect correctly. Not only is it easier to enter and review coordinate and size details in IB, but the tool automatically sizes a lot of elements properly for the container and the control, and offers many guides to help things line up properly - that kind of thing can take a lot of repeated testing to get right.
Related is auto-resizing. Although I don't feel that many screens can actually have auto-reiszing rules that rotate the screen and come out the other side looking just right (I almost always do rotated views as a separate XIB file), there still are a lot of shifts that can occur in the course of running your application that make it really useful to have these defined just right. The best example of this is the enlarged status bar while you are on a call.
Lastly comes customization. This again can be a lot of tedious code to write; try setting up all of the properties on a UILabel manually and it'll have you yearning for quick changes in IB.
With all that said, what is a good approach to custom components? I like to use UIViews in IB screens, with the class type set to a custom UIView that then fills out the display at runtime. But at least IB helps me get composition, placement and auto-resizing just right with minimum fuss, and also wire aspects of that custom view into a controller.
The one thing that would really lend IB to use with custom components is if it would simply let me set values for any simple properties the custom view had - then I could adjust parameters like a corner radius or whatever else I had going on.
I urge you to think on IB a little more, as it's a huge productivity boost when used correctly. There should be nothing about IB that gets in the way, it's there to boost your output.
One book I really liked was Erica Sadun's iPhone Cookbook 1st edition. It did everything programmatically.
Unfortunately the second edition is bloated.
If you reuse lots of your custom UI objects, it would make sense to write a code which
reads a plist (or a more general XML file) specifying how the custom UI objects should be placed / animated
and then creates your custom UI objects accordingly.
It's like writing a mini-xib file format tailored to your UI objects; you can also feel that you're in control of everything, as an added bonus.
I'm playing with Xcode/Interface Builder and I'm able to build simple Navigation apps. I'm wondering how the guys at TapBots manage to get their table views themed like this:
http://tapbots.com/img/software/convertbot/screenshot_05.jpg
(http://tapbots.com/software/convertbot/#gallery)
I've tried setting backgrounds on tables, but I lose the rounded corners.
Is this an easy thing to achieve?
The Tapbots developer spent around 6 months writing a customised UI library, which is what you see there.
It's basically a reimplementation of UIKit with personalised styling.