I have been searching for how to do this the past day or so. I have read comments that you shouldn't do this but when I look at other apps I see it. For an example look at the App Store app. It uses a TabBar at the bottom for navigation. Then at the top of the Featured and Top 25 section it has what appears to be a ToolBar allowing the user to be more specific about what content they wish to view. I would like to implement something similar, but can't figure out how they have done it. The phone app uses this as well.
Am I mistaken that the top bar is a ToolBar?
Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
What you're talking about is a Segmented Control inside a Navigation Bar, a ToolBar is something entirely different. There are plenty of tutorials online for customizing the innards of a Navigation Bar.
In fact you should just be able to drag one into your view's navigation bar within Interface Builder. From there you can customize it's different segments.
Hope this helps.
Related
The UITabBar in my app consists of 10+ items, but the width is enough to put all 10+ items.
How to make a horizontal scrollable UITabBar in iOS ?
Thanks.
You'll have to roll your own to at least some extent.
What might work, would be to create a UITabBar view (not the controller) and embedded it in a UIScrollView. You could then use that in place of your regular Tab Bar control by adding it to your TabBarController.view/tabBarView or something. Of course you'd have to play around to get it to look right, and I'm not sure if just setting the view to something wider will actually make it display more items or not.
Of course, for best results you'd probably want to do something entirely custom.
From Apple's Developer Portal:
If you add more than five items to the viewControllers property, the tab bar controller automatically inserts a special view controller (called the More view controller) to handle the display of the additional items.
Source
Seems like you will need to make a custom tab bar.
They also said this in the next paragraph:
Although the tab bar view is a key part of your tab bar interface, you do not modify that view directly.
You might be breaking Apple's design guidelines by doing this.
You can certainly go and create a custom class of the UITabBar (embedding it into a scrollview etc.)..but why re-invent the wheel? After searching around I found several third-party classes already created that work well and are easy to use and highly customizable..In order of personal preference:
M13InfiniteTabBar -
https://github.com/Marxon13/M13InfiniteTabBar
JSScrollableTabBar -
https://github.com/jasarien/JSScrollableTabBar
InfiniTabBar -
https://github.com/iosdeveloper/InfiniTabBar
I'm looking to create a UI similar to that of the Maps application just to try out some odds and ends and brush up on my knowledge of interface builder.
What i'm struggling to discern at the moment is how the Maps application handles the interactions between the toolbar and the navigation controller and which UI elements are needed to mimic the interface. I'm guessing that the Maps app only has one view controller which kind of negates the need for a navigation controller so i'm not sure if i'm using the right application template currently but i'll come back to that one later.
To give you an idea of what I'm looking to copy, if you search for directions between two locations and then hit route, the navigation controller changes from:
[Clear] Directions [Cancel]
to:
[Edit] {car | train | walk} [Start]
That's all fine so far, nothing out of the ordinary from what i'm used to doing. What is confusing me however is the semi transparent view underneath the navigation controller that displays the total distance and time (or other information depending on the search method). What is the UI element? Is it simply a toolbar tacked on to the main view? How would I go about adding this to my app, is it part of the view, or part of the navigation controller?
Also, in a similar vein... Clicking the "Search" segment in the toolbar displays the search field at the top of the app. Is this in the navigation controller, or is the navigation controller hidden whilst the search field is displayed? Again, clicking "Directions" displays the search field but this time with an additional search field and a button to switch the order of the fields. How is this achieved?
I'm not so good with the terminology so excuse me if i've mixed up some terms. I'm just trying to get to grips with the UI elements as i've spent most of my time learning OpenGL so it's all a bit new to me still. If anyone can point out the right UI elements used in the Maps application, that would be greatly appreciated!
Many thanks for reading.
Edit: I've uploaded an image to illustrate the UI elements i'm querying in this question.
I have no inside information, so I'm speculating on how I'd do it.
I'd use a UIToolBar for both the top and bottom bars, not a navigation bar. You can put a tool bar anywhere as they're just a subclass of UIView.
The semi transparent view underneath the navigation controller is likely just a custom view on top of the map view. Again, just a subclass of UIView.
The items in both toolbars would call methods in the view controller that could change the contents of either tool bar or hide or show other views.
For example, the Search button might call a showSearchToolbar: method, while the Directions calls a showDirectionsToolBar: method. Both methods would just change the contents of the top tool bar and hide or show the view beneath the top tool bar.
Check out the UICatalog example code from Apple to see how to dynamically change the contents of the tool bar.
What I'd like to do is have 3 or 4 buttons on a UITabBar. All except one of these behave as normal UTabBar buttons - ie they switch between different views. But I'd like one of the tab bar buttons to perform a function - refresh the app's data - without switching views… Is this at all possible?
I suggest you use a tool bar for something like this and simply change the background of the toolbar to make it look similar of that to a tabbar and then add tabbar buttons to the toolbar button.
Although im pretty sure this will be rejected by apple, as the intended purpose for a tabbar is to change views. It has something to do with the apple guidelines about what users expect from certain UI components. and if you start switching around with the main purpose of a UITabBar it will be a confusing place in the apple application world.
PK
I want to show more tahn four tab bar item on tab bar controller by scrolling tab bar . is it possible in iphone if it is.. please give the exact solution.??
Hoping your positive response
The iPhone SDK creates a kind of "favourites" option automatically, so the user can drop their favourite icon to the tabbar..
Maybe you can extend the UITabbar and implement a "scrolling/swiping" mechanism, but I suggest you not to do that. This because swiping on a menu (tabbar) can be really annoying for the end user and they probably drag their "most-use" icons to the tabbar so don't worry about that. My advise: Save your time, and put it into more interesting features for your app instead of spending hours figuring out how to make a scrolling tabbar...
You can also make your own UIView and "duplicate" the tabbar, so it looks like a tabbar but it actually isn't, but again that's a complete different approach...
Currently the code I need to modify uses a tabBarController with a single selection inside it which takes the user back to the root view, but because it is a tabBar then the whole of the tab is selectable and I need it so only the button positioned in the middle of the tab bar is selected.
I am fairly new to this but know it is not a tabBar that is needed here but something else, maybe just place a button there. Any help would be fantastic. I would post the code up but I am unsure which section would be required. I hope I made myself clear enough :)
Rowley
Tab bars are for switching among different views. If all you want is a home button, a tab bar would not be a good choice. You could use either a simple UIButton, or possibly a tool bar -- though the tool bar is generally used when there is more than one action the user might take.