I am a noob just getting started with Obj-C and iPhone development. I've been going through many examples and tutorials for the past 2 weeks and making good progress learning how to use the CoreLocation, CoreGraphics, MapKit, UI, etc. Very basic and straight-forward. There are many tutorials out there on these subjects.
However, now with that functionality in the bag, I am starting on putting my our project together. Our UI designer has created custom views of many iPhone controls like the UIToolbar, UIActionsheet, etc. Like having custom images for backgrounds and buttons. I cannot find any solid tutorials or advice on how to go about customizing things like the tab bar. For example, some say to create a Category overriding the drawRect method. Others say to subclass the UIToolbar class, but this say this is not recommended and may get appStore rejected. At this point I am confused and frustrated at which direction to start. Can someone with experienced with UI customization and app store approval please give me some direction or point me to some good tutorials? Thank you.
I would suggest that you can customise what Apple allow you to easily do with the available APIs and follow Apple's advice to not override drawrect. Oh and watch some of this years ADC videos.
Of course the coming ios5 will greatly increase your uikit customisation possibilities for ios5 devices.
Related
http://itunes.apple.com/app/bloomberg/id281941097?mt=8
On the second screenshot or this Bloomberg iPhone app..
Can anyone tell me what is the component just above the TABBAR, which shows
(Bloomberg Last Updated: 22:40) called. I don't think so there is such component or may be i don't know.
Or if you can tell me how to create one that would be very helpful
Thanks...
I'd say it is just a standatd UIView with gradient background and 2 labels to display text in different colors and alignment... May be there's some border drawing there as well
There's a lot of resources in customizing iphone UI. Read Quartz drawing guide for drawing basics. The recent ones come to the mind - Ray Wenderlich is posting a series of tutorials on core graphics now.
I think there're relevant sections in video courses available on itunes - from Stanford University or from Brad Larson. etc etc...
I am looking to implement a "world High Scores" for a game I wrote. I have several games already installed on my phone and was wondering how developers are creating those fancy looking "High Score" table views?
I have seen some very cool ones...some showing the scores within a view that pops up from the bottom, showing half way and then having buttons across the top of the view to show Local, and Global scores. Orba is the game I am speaking about.
I guess what I am asking is: Are these just regular uiTableViews with different background images and if so, does this all have to be done via code and not via builder?
Any example links would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Geo...
George,
I would suggest this excellent article by Matt Gallagher: Easy custom UITableView drawing. He goes through great pains to show and explain many ways to customize UITableViews.
Without seeing a specific example, I hope this helps.
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.
If you look at the Notes app on the iPad, you can see it uses all native iPhone controls, but they're "skinned" to look like a pad of paper. What's the best way to implement something similar to that? Could I use interface builder and simply change the background image for each of the controls, including the TableViews?
Thanks in advance for all your help! I'm going to continue researching this question right now.
This article from Dr Touch will probably come in handy: Stuff you learn from reverse engineering Notes.app
It's a little more complicated than that. My suggestion is manifold:
Hire a real designer to make the artwork.
Subclass whatever controls you want to skin, and handle this business directly in drawRect:. Interface Builder will not help you in this instance.
Consider drawing your controls programmatically instead of using images; a really cool thing would be to cache the programmatic drawings so that they only have to be performed once.
Best of luck!
I need a documents or blogs and so on.. I'm realy interesting the animating views, user interface elements on the cocoa-touch king of crash course and how to design them in the photoshop or like that.
I found a few books about describing this subject. As i described the subject i realy need to crash information about these. I know i know, i think and heard somebodies says "you should read a lot of books for achieving this".
Does anyone have any suggestions ?
Bill Dudney's Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone has a lot of good info.
For a crashcourse in animating views on the iPhone/iPod you basically need to read one chapter within apples developer documentation:
UIView Class Reference -> Animating Views
If you care to jump in even quicker, have a look at code examples like MoveMe.app.
I'd recommend reading through Apple's Core Animation Programming Guide. In addition to Bill Dudney's book, it's the best overall resource out there for learning Core Animation. The UIView class documentation describes how to do UIView animations.
There are a number of good code examples around here dealing with animations under the core-animation tag. Additionally, you can search for iPhone animation to find many iPhone-specific animation questions and answers here. I've learned quite a bit from many of the answers.