I'm creating an app and I need some help with design.
Launch Screen - I want to show 6-8 "category" buttons with labels loaded from an array ("normal" buttons from interface builder - not tab bar buttons or menu bar buttons).
Table Screen - When one of the category buttons is pushed on the launch screen, I want to show a table view with all of the items in that category.
Detail Screen - When one of the items on the table screen is selected, go to a new screen with details for the item. There will be an action button on this screen which will remove the item from the list if pressed.
My questions are as follows:
1) I don't want to show navigation buttons on the first screen. Can I still use a Navigation-Based application and hide the navigation controls on the first screen, or would it be better (easier) to create a view-based application and put a navigation controller "inside" one of the views? I'm totally open to any basic design approach suggestions you may have.
2) I've figured out how to create a sqlite3 file, add it to the project, query it, and generate the table view from the results, but I'm not sure about how to store the sqlite file in a way that will persist on the device when the user upgrades the app later. Any pointers on that?
Thanks for any help/links/documentation you can point me to. I've watched a million tutorials but none of the ones I've seen really address basic app design.
Now for Q1, both ways work fine but if you have buttons from the first screen, having a uinavigationcontroller might make it slightly easier if you plan to have back buttons on the screens after the first screen.
For Q2, to make the database persist when the user updates their app at some stage, simply keep the original database and include a new database (with a different name) with additional content, then modify your original database and import any additional content to it.
You can also do variations of that also, ie import content from old database to new database and etc. But the key is to keep the database file names different, ie add database_v1.sqlite, database_v2.sqlite and etc.
BTW don't forget to clean up any databases you won't use in future.
Related
I am building a jscript-based Windows 8 Metro app. The main screen of this application is a scrolling "panorama" view with several list views showing various aspects of the app's state. In some cases the user will select something on the page which results in a navigation to another page (using the WinJS.Navigation.navigate method.
When the user hits the back arrow on the other page, it returns to the main screen, and I use "scrollIntoView" on to position the screen to the section that the user was working on before the navigation occurred.
Unfortunately this hardly ever results in correctly positioning the view. It seems random. I suspect that the page isn't finished being built yet and that the scroll values are set based on the state at some snapshot in time.
Now the question:
Is there some what to be notified by WinJS ListView objects that they are completely rendered and layed out? Or is this the job of the page's ready function?
Thanks for any insight!
Putting multiple list views side by side is Not A Good Idea(TM). I would recommend putting one list view, and placing your content in a grouped data source to get the groups. If the items have different templates, then you can use a custom item Template selector to dynamically select a template.
Additionally, to ensure that the list view is scrolled to the right position, you need to use the indexOfFirstVisible to set the items the name suggests.
I have a very specific application design that I'm trying to figure out how to create with iOS 4.
Here's how it works:
The user selects an installed data set, or triggers a data set download.
The user provides a key for decrypting the data set.
A tab bar is shown with different search options for looking at the data. There are more searches than fit on the tab bar, so there's a More item and an Edit button. (Thanks, Apple!)
The searches provide different options, some requiring an additional screen for setup.
Once a search result is tapped, the user sees details. They can usually tap deeper into the result.
The tab bar stays visible as users look at details, letting them start a different kind of search. Tapping a search takes them back to step 3.
If at any time the device goes to sleep, the data must be locked. This is a hard requirement, despite may efforts to remove it. So at the moment, I'm returning to step 2.
I've implemented this in iPhone OS 3.1 with a UINavigationController for steps 1 and 2. The app pushes a UITabBarController with each tab represented by a UINavigationController for step 3, hiding the navigation on the outer controller. The user then operates within this UITabBarController. For a lock, I just pop the tab controller off the navigation controller.
It mostly works in iPhone OS 3.1, but it's fragile and hackish. There was no good way to change the data set, but the user could just close the app. With iOS 4 this workaround is gone! The only option I see is returning to step 2 on a supsend/resume, which is going to be a terrible multitasking experience.
How should I be doing this?
The tabs don't make sense until the data set is opened and unlocked.
I (and my users) really like the single tap (no matter the depth) to start a new search.
I have an application I'm working on, and I need the user to be able to add new "Shows", "Movements" and "Dots." These are all represented by classes. At the root of the application, all the shows are shown, the user can click on the show, see the movement in that show, then tap on a movement and see the dots in the movement. It works beautifully.
Now, I need the user to be able to add and edit these instances of these classes. The way I am thinking this will work is when the user clicks on the "Add Show" button (Or the "Add Movement", etc) a new view will be pushed onto the Navigation Controller. This works. When the button is pressed, a new instance of the show class is created, and passed to the new view controller. This also works. If the user wants to edit the show, then they will hit the edit button for the row, and the instance of the class (which already exists) will be passed to new view controller, and the user will be able to edit it (It should use the same view controller for adding and editing)
My question is, in the examples I have seen, it is always really dirty to create the editing view. The edit view is a table view with each row having some sort of control. Usually it is a UITextField, but it may be a slider, and it may be one where another view is popped, and the user needs to check one value. (This is similar to the address book application when adding and editing a contact)
Is there any way that is cleaner than just manually going in and creating a bunch of arrays to hold what custom table view cells need to be at what row? This gets very messy, very fast. I can do it this way, I just was wondering if there is a better, possibly faster way.
To my knowledge there's no structural solution to solve this. I'm afraid managing the cells with child UITextField or other controls yourself is the only method. This indeed gets dirty and painful very fast, I certainly feel your pain.
Although it doesn't exist, it would be very convenient if Apple added out of the box editing cells to the SDK, similar to the different normal cell styles. I haven't come across an open source project that addresses this issue, but it might exist.
If you do find a better/cleaner method to handle these situations, be sure to ping back.
as far as i know, editing mode is the only way to make the changes you describe (if i understood correctly). I agree that it doesn't seem like the most elegant approach.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/TableView_iPhone/ManageInsertDeleteRow/ManageInsertDeleteRow.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007451-CH10-SW19
I have a tabController-based iPhone application. First tab is associated with a table view controller. When I select a table cell I want to show another table controller view, but with different tabs on the bottom. What is the best way to do it? Change dynamically tab entries, or do it through IB? Please advise.
Thanks,
Nava
The Apple Human Interface Guidelines really advise against this.
For example, on iPhone, iPod uses a tab bar to allow users to choose which part of their media collection to focus on, such as Podcasts, artists, videos, or playlists. The Clock application, on the other hand, uses a tab bar to give users access to the four functions of the application, namely, World Clock, Alarm, Stopwatch, and Timer. Figure 6-10 shows how selecting a tab in a tab bar changes the view in Clock. Notice how the tab bar remains visible in the different Clock modes shown in Figure 6-10. This makes it easy for users to see which mode they’re in, and allows them to access all Clock modes regardless of the current mode.
What you're thinking of doing might be possible with toolbars.
BTW, I found the best and the cleanest way to do that thanks to Rufus - iPhone Beta Dev Forum contributor: you can change the views of root tabbarcontroller anytime you want, also you can change tabbaritems title & icons. So actually I don't need 2 tabbarcontrollers, instead i change the existing one, setting its views & tabbaritems of views accordingly.
How would one implement a wizard style interface for the iPhone?
For instance I have a form that I would like to break down into 5
different pages or views instead of putting all the information to fill out
into one page or view.
This interface must have the ability to go prev or next in case they want
to change something on page 2 when they are on page 4.
This interface must have the ability to go to page 3 directly and still be
able to go prev and next. Seems like using UINavigationController wouldn't
work here since views 1 and 2 are not on the stack so prev would not work.
Update: Check out the "gas cubby" application. It has what I'm looking for. UITableView presents the items you can fill out. Selecting a row takes you to the detail view to enter data and prev and next to fill in other information.
UINavigationController seems like the obvious solution. It gives you nice, familiar page transitions for free, and if you need to jump to a specific page you can just set up your navigation stack without using the transition animations.
I would say use a Navigation Controller. On the 1st view, show the 5 options in a Table View. The user selects a row, and then the corresponding section is pushed onto the stack as a new UIViewController. So, if they are in view #3 and want to go back to view #1 (to be honest, I would recommend rethinking whether or not somebody in the real world will actually want to do this), they hit "back" and then select view #1 from the table.
I can't think of a better way to do this because you won't have room to do something like breadcrumbing, which Apple would recommend against anyway. You could use a tab bar but that is more like options then some sort of wizard workflow.
If you really want them to be able to skip around the process, the combination of a UINavigation controller with a UISegmentedControl to jump to sections would do what you want. You can either embed the segmented control in the nav bar or place it just below the nav bar (which seems more like what you want since you have five sections).
If the Segmented control is not quite to your taste just put up any set of five buttons to change sections and make them visually appealing.
A "wizard" UI is typically used when you have a relatively small number of steps where one step depends on the previous, at least at some steps, the results or presentation depends on previous steps. This is like a navigation tree that usually results in the use of the navigation controller, but with only one potential branch at each each step. My feeling is that the navigation UI would be perfect, but with one exception; A button on the right hand side of the navigation bar that is the left to right mirror image of the "back" button that is usually found in the left part of the navigation button. That button would navigate to the the next step, and at each step the page presented would allow the user to fill in the information for that step. The only problem then is navigating to a step not the next or previous, and this could be corrected with a custom button that includes a drop-down list of the steps in the process. And this would fit nicely with the rest of the iPhone UI, which Gas Cubby's wizard UI (as good as it is) does not.