I have done some iPhone application development but still am relatively new at it. My question is, how do I design an interface like the face interface, where you have icons that you click that take you to certain things? Is there a template for this in xcode?
Thanks
There are no templates or UIKit classes that constructs a matrix of views. You will have to implement them yourself, or read about Three20 library (specifically launcher module) if it's relevant to what you want to implement.
link : http://three20.info/showcase/launcher
Related
I was wondering how difficult it would be to implement Sproutcore into my webpage for the simple task of being able to scroll DIV's on an iPhone or iPad with one finger instead of two.
Or is there an easier way?
Thank you in advance!
Pulling in SproutCore for just this purpose would be unwise, especially for a mobile app, as it would include far too much weight for very little added functionality for your app.
If you just want to have an iOS scroll view, there are other much lighter libraries for just this. A quick search (for "iOS html scroll view javascript") reveals:
http://code.google.com/mobile/articles/webapp_fixed_ui.html (how google does it)
SproutCore is a complete web application framework; incorporating it into an existing design for the purpose of getting touch scrolling functionality is probably more tool than you need. I'd look at JS libraries which are just interaction libraries, not application frameworks.
I want to start developing IPhone application.
I need to understand something about it - I am working with a graphic designer.
If she supplies the GUI in HTML - will it be easy for me to develop with it?
How does it work? like regular web development?
Apple uses Objective C and Cocoa for iPhone applications. Neither uses HTML; you'll instead be using interactive controls like you'd find in a desktop application. Whether it's easy for you to develop using an HTML mockup will depend entirely on your skills with Cocoa. (In the same way I encourage designers to give me mockups in Photoshop knowing that I can easily build HTML versions of them.)
You might want to start with some of Apple's documentation on iPhone development: http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
For GUI development of your own apps you have several options:
Code: UIKit framework in Objective-C
Interface Builder: Tool to click
your GUI together, but the logic
will be coded like in 1 in C, Obj-C
or C++
You can build a HTML gui and
present it in a web view, but for
native apps, this will only bring
you so far.
Oh, and no native Flash on iOS. :-)
You could write an app that uses HTML for its UI - in essence you'd simply be wrapping a webkit widget and driving your app from events generated by that UI. However, that's not going to give you a UI that really takes advantage of the phone.
For that, you need to get down and dirty with Objective C and the Cocoa Touch API for iOS. Another option is using Flash CS5, which is ActionScript based.
Strictly speaking, the answer is no, your HTML skills are not transferrable.
That said, there are two projects that deserve looking into, both of which are about producing native (or "native-ish") apps from HTML and JavaScript. The first is PhoneGap, and the second (which I think is more robust and promising) is called Appcellerator.
Neither of them give you really-and-truly full access to to the iPhone API, but they do allow a significant flattening of the learning curve for people who already have well developed web app skillz.
If you go the native route, bear this in mind: it took me about a month to go from being a web developer to being a slightly competent iOS developer, and six months or so to feel solid and reliable and productive with iOS.
The interface of my iPad app has multiple section boxes (looks similar to this stackoverflow page). I'm new to xcode and iOS programming but have years of web development experience. I would like to know what is the best way to design this.
Should I put everything in one xib file? (section1headerlabel, section1text1,section1text2..)
or should each section be its own xib file? (like server side include in web dev) if so how do I do this?
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
I find that if I'm doing complex things, I generally skip Interface Builder all together and create the view hierarchy using code. I can do better encapsulation this way.
For information on how to do this, check out this q&a: What's the best tutorial for iPhone development, sans Interface Builder?
I like using Dashcode for making quick little web apps, but it specifically targets the iphone version of mobile safari, which is not acceptable for cross-platform development. I've developed a number of laundry-list hacks that I tend semi-manually add to my scripts to facilitate cross platform development (like, say, to the Android or Palm) and to perform useful iPhone tricks, like stopping the 'bounce' associated with web apps on the iphone and I'm turning these into custom Dashcode Parts so that I can drag & drop them into my project. This is mostly working so far, but here my dilemma:
How can I create a custom Inspector component to go along with my custom Dashcode Part? Is it possible? Ever heard of being done? What are the minimum steps?
I see some compiled .nib files, and an existin Dashcode Part's Info.plist has a key CYPartInspectorClass that maps to CYPushButtonInspectorPane and like CYPushButtonInspectorPane and that apparently corresponds to English.lproj/CYPushButtonInspectorPane.nib which is a compile .nib. Does this imply that everything here is semi-hardcoded, and thus impossible to add my Inspector changes?
Any pointers to the above would be helpful.
After a lot of digging, I don't think this is possible, but I'd still be happy to eventually be proven wrong.
Does anybody know where I could find WinForms controls that mimic those on the iPhone? I am interested in doing some iPhone prototyping using Visual Studio and it would be handy if I could make the controls look like the native iPhone controls.
I know that I could just use Interface Builder on a Mac, but I do not want to do this. I just want to play around with various ideas and I will be much faster in Visual Studio.
Balsamiq Mockups has some iPhone-like controls, and you get a mock up done faster than in Visual Studio.
I've had a look around for windows forms iPhone controls for mocking and positioning items and couldn't find any. However it's quite easy to do yourself with a few screenshots from the iPhone Simulator. Below is what I've done - I'll update with a download link to the project a bit later.
As mentioned Apple probably won't like, nor let you release a product using their UI style. However for mocking there is nothing to stop you doing it in Visual Studio - they still get their $99 and appstore cut.
I use Visual Studio as I do XIB-less Monotouch development in it, and want to avoid switching back and forth. For XIB-less apps, designing with interface Builder isn't much faster in my view - but that's a Monotouch-centric viewpoint.
As I pointed out here, an alternative to doing this in WinForms might be to mock up your interface using the Briefs framework. Briefs lets you use images of any kind to represent screens of your application, and assign interaction behaviors to areas of the images. You can generate a fully functional iPhone application from this for quick testing of your user interface.
There are a number of iPhone UI wireframe elements for Photoshop and other illustration applications out there, so it's pretty easy to draw up your prototype interfaces.
Since the iPhone's UIKit controls are very likely highly protected by Apple's trademark and copyrights, I wouldn't expect to find alternative implementations. Since any iPhone development will eventually require using Interface Builder, it's worth repeating what many others have said: use the right tool for the job. Learn Interface Builder (it won't take long) and quit trying to shoehorn iPhone development into the Windows tooling.
If you are interested in doing iPhone apps in C#/VB.NET, MonoTouch is the way to go
http://monotouch.net/
To me it is weird to emulate iPhone UI in WinForms as they are two worlds apart.
You can take help of this new tool Xamarin, which helps you to create the native application by using c#.