I am in the process of adding Game Center to one of my apps. What I would like to do is set up a leader board per "continent" (North America, South America, Asia, Europe, etc.).
Question 1: If I do this, does game center have the ability to show all results for all leader boards on one leader board? Meaning, I can allow users to see if they are top in their continent, but then also allow them to check their ranking overall. Possible?
Question 2: Since my app is Universal, is there a way to force the standard GC Leader board on the iPad to full screen? I have played around with the GKLeaderBoardViewController view.bounds and although this does allow me change the size, it still maintains the original border of the default size. Meaning, there is a square box around the middle of the view, but the data is actually expanded like it should be. (I wish I knew how to include pics here) Have also used the modelPresentationStyle but same results with the box around a smaller portion of the screen.
Finally, concerning both questions above, is it just better to create your own custom view? I was hoping to avoid this especially since the newer look from iOS 5 Leader boards are actually very nice.
Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.
Geo...
So yes the do allow for one main combined leader board. Just a matter of creating a combined one and adding the others as you see fit.
As for making Game Center full screen on the iPad, no response and luck with searches.
Geo...
Related
How to implement a way to measure distances in real time (video camera?) on the iPhone, like this app that uses a card to compare the size of the card with the actual distance?
Are there any other ways to measure distances? Or how to go about doing this using the card method? What framework should I use?
Well you do have something for reference, hence the use of the card. Saying that after watching the a video for the app I can't seem it seems too user friendly.
So you either need a reference of an object that has some known size, or you need to deduct the size from the image. One idea I just had that might help you do it is what the iPhone's 4 flash (I'm sure it's very complicated by it might just work for some stuff).
Here's what I think.
When the user wants to measure something, he takes a picture of it, but you're actually taking two separate images, one with flash on, one with flash off. Then you can analyze the lighting differences in the image and the flash reflection to determine the scale of the image. This will only work for close and not too shining objects I guess.
But that's about the only other way I thought about deducting scale from an image without any fixed objects.
I like Ron Srebro's idea and have thought about something similar -- please share if you get it to work!
An alternative approach would be to use the auto-focus feature of the camera. Point-and-shoot camera's often have a laser range finder that they use to auto-focus. iPhone doesn't have this and the f-stop is fixed. However, users can change the focus by tapping the camera screen. The phone can also switch between regular and macro focus.
If the API exposes the current focus settings, maybe there's a way to use this to determine range?
Another solution may be to use two laser pointers.
Basically you would shine two laser pointers at, say, a wall in parallel. Then, the further back you go, the beams will look closer and closer together in the video, but they will still remain the same distance apart. Then you can easily come up with some formula to measure the distance based on how far apart the dots are in the photo.
See this thread for more details: Possible to measure distance with an iPhone and laser pointer?.
Is there a way to capture the amount of screen that is making contact with the users? I assume there is since this finger painting app shows the ipad responding to only the pixels that the user makes contact with.
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
The size of the touch is abstracted away by the framework, and UITouches only contain calculated (“best estimated”) points instead of the raw, actual areas that were touched. I would guess that the “pressure” was calculated from the duration and the direction of the touch.
In a nutshell, there is no public API to get the contact area.
I don't think Apple provides APIs for the size of the touch, or as #nickthedude said (I think) any kind of way to measure pressure. Basically, you need to implement your own algorithm/policy for determining line thickness/opacity/other effects. I believe a common way to do this is to measure the amount of time spent for the stroke, and work from there. For instance, if the user moved more quickly, you might want a thinner line segment. Apple really should just provide a canvas view of some kind. Best of luck!
to get the exact area you may have to roll your own but you can get uievents pretty easily and then do some magic from there. Basically impliment/override touchesBegan, touchesEnded, touchesMoved on the UIView in question and put in your custom code there.
Looking at the video maybe the amount of touches in the UIEvent set might correspond to the "pressure" of the touch, then again maybe not.
What if you laid down a series of successively smaller square uiviews wherever the user touched then if the touches "spilled" into the larger uiviews behind the smaller front ones than you could conjecture that the touch pressure was harder. Something to try I guess. Good luck.
Why not just describe what you want to do and foxus on asking about that instead - it may not have anything at all to do with the example that has you so otherwise enthralled - I can use a camera to monitor your hand from across the table and paint pixels on the screen via BT, completely ignoring any contact between your fingers and the screen.
I have a duplicate bridge scoring application with two different sorting modes.
Let me fill you in on how duplicate bridge works so you have an idea what I'm looking for. You sit and play a few hands of bridge against one set of opponents. Then you and the boards move and you play a few more hands of bridge against a new set of opponents. Repeat until the end of the night (usually around 24 boards). You don't necessarily play the boards in order. For instance you may play 1-3, 7-9, 13-15, ..., and eventually 4-6. Other people play them in a different order.
So now for the two sorting modes. There's sort by board order (fairly easy to come up with an icon like the "1-24" I settled on) and there's sort by order played.
Which of these choices is appropriate?
A. A clock
B. A calendar
C. Something else
P.S. I remember reading an article a while back about how using a clock for this would be cause for rejection, but haven't been able to find it.
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions!
I think a down arrow with a clock.
An hourglass(saves you from the clock metaphor) with a horizontal arrow, as time is more likely perceived as a horizontal flow.
Is there a way to convert an image on the fly to "Red on Black" for accessibility? I have pictures that I want to stream to the iphone. Viewing them at night, Red on Black is better for viewing.
Answer:
You're much better off making your own night friendly images, and swapping those out along with text color, etc.
I'm not sure how you have your current images implemented, but before they load you could check for BOOL isNightTime, and if it returns TRUE, then load the nightTime images instead. I would suggest taking your current image set, and duplicating it with the prefix nt_.
Bonus:
You can take this a step further. Grab the GPS location, then use the location to get weather information from Wunderground. Part of their report includes the times of Sunrise and Sunset. You could then use those values and check them against the current time (be careful that all the time zones are playing nice), and from the result of that, enable the NightTime image set.
If you do implement this, make sure that the user can still enable or disable it to his/her preference.
I had originally said NOAA, but I can't find where that information is on their website. I know it's there somewhere. Why are .gov sites so ugly? Anyways, I changed it to mention Wunderground instead, just scroll down to the Astronomy section. They have a pretty well done iPhone website as well, worth checking out.
Bonus 2:
I'm unsure what your maps/images look like, but instead of having to edit them all to red on black, you could instead edit them to white on black, and put a layer on top of that which would allow the user to pick any color/intensity. Instead of using a layer, you could likely also programmatically implement it, but I think a colorizing layer would be much faster/easier.
An alternate method of doing this is to instead make your map transparent/black, and put a layer underneath that which could change colors to the user's liking. You could implement this on a finer scale (place rects of color behind objects/text/whatever else) to allow for full color customization.
Both use transparency to some extent, but I believe that the alternate method requires less overall work.
Bonus 3:
If you're already going through the effort to grab the GPS coordinates, it wouldn't be too much additional work to have it also check with another server, which would point out other users using the application locally on the map. Make sure this is disabled by default, as lots of users are uncomfortable with broadcasting their location to the world.
Science:
It's also worth mentioning that green is a horrible color to use if you're looking for night friendliness. Red is the color you want to be using. Red light doesn't cause the eye to release the enzymes which cause you to lose your nightvision (what you get once your eyes adjust). This is the reason the inside of military vehicles usually have red interior lights, and also why every movie you've ever seen with tactical anything uses lots of red lighting.
Red light is also used to preserve night vision in low-light or night-time situations, as the rod cells in the human eye aren't sensitive to red.
-Wikipedia
I learned this when I went up to Kitt Peak National Observatory this Thanksgiving on a family trip to Arizona. They hand out little keychains with red lights on them, so you can see where you're going in the dark. It was probably one of the coolest things I've ever participated in. I learned so much. If you're in the Tuscon area, or have another observatory local to you, I strongly suggest checking them out.
The keychain they gave me broke and it fell off somewhere, it's nowhere to be found :( It was my only souvenir. If anybody from KPNO happens to see this and wants to mail me another one, my email address is in my profile.
Also here's a link that goes into far much more detail than needed, but I know you're all going to google it anyways.
I did find another solution:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/photoshopframew/
Source code is available and i can run the tiles through photoshop as part of a chain of events for night viewing.
I'm starting a new project which involves developing an interface for a machine that measures wedge and roundness of lenses and stores the information in a database and reports on it. There's a decent chance we're going to be putting a touch screen on this machine so that it doesn't need to have a mouse or keyboard...
I don't have any experience developing for full size touch screens, so I'm looking for advice/tips/info from you guys...
I can imagine you want to make the elements a little larger than normal... space buttons out a bit more.... things like that... anyone have anything else to add?
A few things to consider:
You need to account for parallax error when touching controls. Basically, the user may touch the screen above or below your actual control and therefore miss the control. This is a combination of the size of the control (eg you can have the active area larger than visual control to allow the user to miss and still activate the control), the viewing angle of the user (which you may or may not be able to predict/control) and the type of touch screen you're using. If you know where the user will be placed relative to the screen when using it, you can usually accommodate this with appropriate calibration.
Depending on the type of touch screen, you may need to ensure that your users aren't wearing gloves or using an implement other than their fingers (eg the end of a pen) to touch the screen. Some screens (eg those depending on conductance) don't respond well to anything other than flesh and blood.
Avoid using double clicks because it can be very hard for users to reliably double click a control. This can be partly mitigated if you've got experienced/trained users working in a fairly controlled environment where they're used to the screens.
Linked to the above, if you are using double clicks, you may find the double click activated when the user only wants to single click. This is because it's very easy for the user's finger to bounce slightly on touching the screen and, depending on how sensitive the double click settings are, trigger a double rather than a single click. For this and the previous reason, we always disable double clicks and only use single clicks (or similar single activation controls).
However big you think you need to make the controls to allow for touch activation, they almost certainly need to be bigger still. Make sure you test the interface with real users in the real deployment environment (or as close to it as you can get). For example, we deployed some screens with nice big buttons you couldn't miss only to find that the control room was unheated and that the users were wearing thick gloves in the middle of winter, making their fingers way bigger than we had allowed for.
Don't put any controls near the edges of the screen - it's very hard to get your finger into the edges (particularly if the screen has a deep bezel) and a slight calibration problem can easily shift the control too close to the edge to use. Standard menus and scroll bars are a good example of controls that can be very tricky to use on a touch screen and you should either avoid them (which is preferable - they're not good for touch screens) or replicate them with jumbo equivalents.
Remember that the user's hand will be over the screen, obscuring some of the screen and controls (typically those below where the user is touching, but it depends on the position of the user relative to the screen). Don't put instructions or indicators where the user's hand or arm will obscure them when trying to use the control they relate to (eg typically put them above rather than below the control).
Depending on the environment, make sure your touch screen is suitably proofed against dust, damp, grease etc and make sure it's easy to clean without damaging it. You wouldn't believe the slime that can quickly accumulate on a touch screen in an industrial or public setting.
The other obvious one is that there's no equivalent of pointer 'hover'. Not that that affects many apps though.
If you decide to put in analog controls (scrollbars, rotation widgets, etc) be sure to put in a digital control also. Some companies think that a touch screen means perfect control over something with your fingers. In real life, this translates to minutes of frustration trying to fix a number that's just a little off.
The most obvious thing is that everything on the GUI needs to be big enough for a fingertip to hit, which is sometimes bigger than you think.
As has been mentioned, there's really no way for a right-click action to happen. Also, double-clicking can be tricky with a fingertip on a touch screen.
The other major thing is that you'll want to create a on-screen keyboard that pops up for text entry and an on-screen numpad for number only fields.
I wrote my own set of controls for a POS application designed specifically to be touchscreen friendly.
Remember to allow enough real estate for stubby fingers and talons. In our application the users can have these manicures that necessitate them to use the pad of their finger instead of the tip. This means that you need to allow more space for activation areas than you would normally consider in any other type of application.
I would also recommend that you accommodate yourself as a programmer from a testing standpoint and from the point of view that things change and there may need to be a keyboard/mouse attached to a non-touch workstation. I cannot tell you how many times I went to touch my flat panel LCD expecting something to happen, before remembering that I had to use the mouse.
Make sure to read your basic UI principles like Fitz law (The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target).
Also consider whether or not the device is stationary or not when it is in use (e.g., like a palmpilot or iphone), research shows that you must accomodate that into your design.
The larger gui elements is the major thing. But it applies to all elements, scroll bars, tabs and even text fields.
The other major thing that I can think of, it's hard for the user to right click. So things that require a right click should be avoided, context menus are the only thing that comes to mind at the moment.
The other responses are pretty good, but are you totally sure that a touch screen would actually be easier to use? There are a lot of devices where a touch screen actually makes them much harder to use, not easier. The main problem is that you can't use the device when you're not looking at it. If users are going to be doing a lot of repetitive actions, a keyboard could be a lot more efficient.
Also, a touch screen might be a lot harder to use by someone with a disability, if you think there's even a small chance that could happen.
Even though this is quite old now, I found it to still be useful, as a starting point for design considerations.
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/tsdesigngl/index.htm
If you've not already done so, have a look at some of the documentation available for developers on mobile platforms, eg Windows Mobile, iPhone.