I am an Android newbie and I really require your help.
I'd like to develop an app , which its UI is persisted of three Tabs, and the first one a WebView.
since I am not familiar with all the required building blocks, can anyone give me a sample? a guide how to do so?
thanks a lot!
The Android API Demos include several (Tabs1 to Tabs2 sample files) examples. Install, try and have a look at them.
Regarding specifying the content of Tabs you have the possibilities to use Views or Activities. If you check some "Tab" related discussion here you will find that established users prefer to use Views (e.g. here). I took the 'Activity' way so far and feel quite comfortable - but did not go to deep into pros and cons. My current point of view is that you have to decide on each special case and can't give a general recommendation.
there is some tutorials on this page : http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/views/index.html
Related
I'm looking to create a small reference app. It has a UItabBar and 4 views that each load a UITableView which can be drilled down to display, essentially a page of information and pictures, like a book.
If I want to make the page a little more stylised than just using labels and image views, the common consensus seems to be to create HTML pages and load them in a web view.
Being new to this, please could someone give me some direction on where to even begin with this? As I understand it, I essentially need to develop a web page with a text editor, and then what? Actualy upload online and create a public website? It's a little confusing, and as I'm not a developer, a little disheartening to think I'll now have to learn HTML as well as Obj-C to create a simple app.
I'm sure there are some great tools or alternatives out there and if someone could recommend such avenues I'd be incredibly grateful.
Kind regards,
Ryan
If you want to display HTML pages in a UIWebView you can store them in your bundle and display them from there (so no need to put the pages online). It is best though to stick with the UI controls that Apple provides you with. If you need more customization try subclassing some of the standard controls.
If you customize your UI too much it will just confuse the user and degrade their experience.
I want to build an iPhone app that is really a wrapper around a wiki. Specifically, I have some static reference content that can be represented by a hyperlinked set of pages and want to build an app that will provide a nice interface over this content, including search, bookmarking, and annotating. I'm wondering what the best approach is for building something like this.
(I'm spent a fair bit of time googling for answers but pretty much every combination of search terms I can think of returns links to wikis, not links about putting a wiki into an app).
Are there libraries out there for handling wiki content (rendering, navigating links etc.)? I imagine I could just represent my content as a set of local HTML pages and point the web browser control at these but that doesn't seem right. Any ideas on how best to approach this in the iOS world?
Thanks in advance!
Try looking at TWedit, it is a wrapper for the excellent TiddlyWiki which is a single file WIKI built around JavaScript and HTML. TW is very powerful and well supported with many plugins available.
I'm writing code that will allow my iphone-app to have a "configuration page".
A grouped, scrolling, UITableView... with cells that contain the needed textFields, switches, sliders, etc.
It is an ENOURMOUS amount of code. Is there an easier way?
Is there a way I could create a simple text-file, contain all my desired design choices and have my (reusable) code build the TableView for me?
Or... can I just do the whole thing quicker/easier in Interface Builder instead of code?
Basically there are two approaches here :
you rely on what Apple gives you and implement a Bundle Settings (basically a dictionary that describes how the settings screen should look like), and then , your settings will be in the "Settings" application of the iPhone.
The drawback here is that what apple provides is quite limited and you won't be able to implement some of the most complicated settings you can see in "standard" (pre-installed) apple application settings.
That's why many developers are switching to "inapp" settings thanks to open source FWK or they reimplement everythingh from scratch but it can be a lot of code as you said.
You reimplement your own UIViewController for settings or you rely on some framework that will provide you the UIViewController to extend from and ease your implementation.
There are 2 good frameworks for that (Jesse cited one of them, but there's another one )
InAppSettings ( http://inscopeapps.com/blog/inappsettings-10/ )
InAppSettingsKit ( http://inappsettingskit.com/ )
A comparison of the two framework can be found here : http://inscopeapps.com/blog/inappsettings-vs-inappsettingskit/
(ok that's from one of the two authors but at least this gives an idea ;)
If you can live with the limitations of the standard application preferences in iPhone, you can actually create this using a settings bundle which only needs a plist and optionally a localized strings file.
You can check out Apple documentations for this:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/ApplicationSettings/ApplicationSettings.html
Claus
If you're looking for a ready made and reusable solution, you can check
http://www.inappsettingskit.com/
It's open source too, so it's useful as a base.
I never found an easy and efficient way to build complicated table view by using Interface Builder, so I think programming the settings view is more preferable.
If you're talking about using a text file or plist, you may want to mimic the Settings Bundle design of Settings app.
Load the plist data upon the app launch.
I've built something like what you're looking for. Going off Claus's answer as well, it basically just duplicates the interface of the Settings application using the same settings.plist file as the settings app. The only difference is that it's a view controller that you can put inside the app. There's a surprisingly small amount of coding involved, it was just a lot of looking at the settings app to see exactly how things were laid out.
We we wondering what are some ways developers have added a help function to their apps. What are some techniques people have used?
One way we were thinking of is to us UIWebView to display a HTML file with help instructions.
Thoughts appreciated.
I'm using UIWebView right now which pretty much contains all the help in a single page, along with some JQuery things to display popups, etc. But I like the way iCab Mobile (et al.) are doing things which is a sectioned UITableView with each row a separate topic or section within their overall help information (complete with icons...) then in their bundle they have each section in its own html file, organized by localization.
Another thing in my queue for the next release is to provide a dynamic "News" view. The rough idea is as follows... I have on my server a file or CGI where I can place small bits of news I'd like to push out to users. On startup, my app checks for network availability and if present, start a thread to see if anything has changed on the server since last updating the News data. If changes present, post an alert letting user know, and asking if they'd like to read it now. At that point, the latest news is already downloaded and cached, so they can simply read it later if they want, and I won't post anymore alerts until the server file changes again. (And one could add a preference/setting to disable these alerts.)
I'm thinking this would be a good way to let people know that some nasty bug is known and fixed and an update is sitting in the queue, solicit beta testers, promote upcoming features or other apps, etc. I can see where constant alerts everytime I've got something new to promote would get annoying, so having a setting to disable them means the user never has to read them unless they want to. Although some kind of override to warn of recently discovered/fixed bugs seems sensible.
FWIW, the author of Mover+/Mover has just started doing a similar thing, though I think Emanuele is perhaps only showing one Notelet at a time, whereas I envision a bit more of a history (shown in UIWebView) until I decide to age stuff off the bottom of the stack.
I'm using a scroll/page view to show several images containing small notes. Each image then tells the user about the more advanced functions on a specific part of the app.
In my opinion the help should only contain information that isn't a 100% relevant for the use of the application. It should be things the advanced user should use to make more use of the app. It should contain gold for the power users. The "basics" should be so obvious that no help would ever be needed. If that's not the case, I think, you've failed as a developer on the iPhone platform.
(Here's a screen shot from my demo app)
I'm currently creating a fairly complicated app. I'm thinking of doing help as a semi-transparent overlay - help in text form is hard to swallow for users; it's much more helpful to just point at stuff and say "this does that".
The problem? I look up stuff in the xcode documentation and find very useful lists of objects, methods, etc... But then I still have to go somewhere else to find useful example code of how to use that object. For example, I looked up NSNumber yesterday and found all of the neat stuff it can do, but I still had no clue how to use it. That's just an example. I'm sure I could read the objective c pdf front to back and learn something there (which I plan on doing) but what about later? When I'm looking up some UIKit object? Do I have to go find a tutorial each time (or lately, I just ask StackOverflow and you guys take care of me).
Is there a part of the apple website / xcode documentation that shows the example code I'm looking for?
Is there a wiki site out there or something that has what I'm looking for? (I just tried a simple google search "iphone sdk wiki". this site could be good. iphone sdk wiki . I'll check it out. Anyone else have one they like? )
This is also sort of a mild complaint to Apple. Why not a section on each code definition page that shows usage?
I've found the sample code section on Apple's iPhone Developer Connection be extremely useful not only for samples of complete applications but also a best practices source. Going through the code of The Elements, for example, will expose you to how to use particular classes as well as how to structure your code. It is a wonderful example of how to create a non-trivial iPhone app.
Look in developer.apple.com/iphone they have pretty good documentation (you can use the search bar there) on all the classes and have a lot of good sample code..
I really would emphasize the "Related sample code" section on many, if not most, of the documented classes.
But, IMHO, there isn't any easy way of acquiring the knowledge to develop in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch. The API's are so numerous that it simply takes a lot of time and experience. You just have to work on it, look at a lot of books and study the sample source code where available.
I've tried to take a purposeful approach by carving out some time every week to learning a new API/class irrespective of whether my current project needs it or not.
Alternatively, search Joe Hewitt. He's the developer for iPhone facebook. He has a project you can download that demonstrates all the features of facebook. It's an awesome open source project!
When you look something up in Xcode Developer Documentation, you sometimes get a Related Sample Code: text that tells you what Sample the method or property is used in. Too bad you can't click on it to see the code, but if you do click it takes you to the page to download the sample. – mahboudz 0 secs ago
Apple Developer site has all kinds of code examples. Try searching google for a UICatalog project, it will show you all the basic UI stuff you can do, like adding buttons and progressbars through using only code.