I am pretty new to iPhone development and currently working on an application which includes a view that performs a simple numerical calculation. In particular, the user enters 3 or 4 values into text fields and the view displays the result. Something along the lines of http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm
What is the nicest way to achieve this? I am currently using simple UITextFields and a UILabel for the result but it doesn't look nice or "native-like". What UI object would be best to use?
Thank you!
It's entirely up to you. You're using the right classes for actual input- it comes down to how you choose to style those classes. I'd suggest looking at the documentation for UIView and CALayer (youView.layer, and include QuartzCore framework in your project).
A good start might be to choose a color scheme, a background for your app, and the look and feel you're shooting for- this will inform your styling. Try looking for apps that you think are elegant and attractive, and boil down what they do and what you like about them.
I'd say;
use a grouped table style (with the white tables with round corners on a blueish striped background)
embed settings values directly in the cell (aligned to the right) as much as possible
you can show a relevant keyboard (text, numbers) or picker view to let the user pick values, directly when they tap the cell. Use sliders and switches where relevant.
You may want to take a look at http://www.inappsettingskit.com/, we are currently investigating it for the same purpose and it seems to do the job
You can use either a UISlider or a UIPickerView if some of your values have limits.
You can use UISwitch for toggles.
You can also switch the default keyboard for your textfields to be numeric.
Other than that you seem to be on the right track.
Also, sometimes putting a view inside a scrollview makes things seem cooler even if its only one page. The auto bounce on scrollviews is kind of cool.
Related
I'd like to display two windows on screen with scrolling text in them e.g. top window will have one bible translation while the bottom view would have another.
Ideally, I'd like them to stay in sync so they're both showing the same point in their respective translations (i.e. switch to John Ch1 in top view, bottom view follows and does same). But for now I'm just curious how to get these into two seperate viewable windows.
Any ideas?
In all honesty, I dont think you have the screen space to do this for the iPhone in such a way that is visually comfortable for the user.
That aside, the best method would depend on how the rest of your app is built. You can create a view that contains two UITextViews in it, each taking up roughly half the screen. You should be able to scroll one as a response to the other scrolling, though I haven't done this, so I cannot tell you how to do it exactly.
Another option that you have is to use a main UITextView, and then a second UIModalView that is overlaid above it. It all depends on the app structure.
Just to note, unless you have specific markers for points of translation, it would be very hard to have them sync up in that way. You could try to match line numbers, or something like that, but due to languages being so different, one might take 3 lines, and a translation might take 4 to say the same thing.
This is a fairly basic question, so you should perhaps revisit the iOS Application Programming Guide, but in a nutshell, you'd have two UITextView elements inside a view in your application, and you can synchronize between them using the built in setter method
- (void)setContentOffset:(CGPoint)contentOffset animated:(BOOL)animated
You have two needs here:
(1) You need to create a data model that can hold the translations and link each chapter and verse in each translation to the chapter and verse in all the other translations. For that, I would suggest learning Core Data. Be prepared to spend some time learning it.
(2) You need to display the translations. For this I would suggest you use two UITextViews in the same containing view. However, as Karoly S noted, there really isn't room on an iphone screen for two text views. I would recommend using two views connect by a flip transition which will allow you to have one translation on a full screen and then flip over to the other translation. The user could flip rapidly back and forth to compare.
I'm new to iPhone development, and I have a question on how to create a view for my application.
The view should display a problem (using formatted/syntax highlighted text), and multiple possible answers. The user should be able to click on an answer to validate it.
Currently, I am trying to use a UITableView embedding UIWebView as contentView. That allows me to display formatted text easily.
The problem is that it is a real pain to compute and adjust the height of the cells. I have to preload the webview, call sizeToFit, get its height, and update the cell accordingly. This process should be done for the problem and the answers (as they are HTML formatted text too).
It's such a pain that I am planning to switch to something else. I thought using only a big UIWebView and design everything in HTML. But I looked at some articles describing how to communicate between the HTML page and the ObjectiveC code. This seems to involve some awful tricks too...
So... that's it, I don't really know what I should do.
I guess some of you dealt with such things before, and would provide some greatly appreciated tips :)
The catch here is that the iPhone API does not yet support NSAttributedString so you can't just set the text to appear as you would like in a textview.
I saw one work around which essentially used individual UILabels to represent each attribute run. (Can't find the link now.) They used NSString UIKit extensions to calculate the position of the strings on the view and then used that to position the labels.
Another work around would be to draw the strings with their attributes to a UIImage and then just display the image. That would be the easiest solution I think.
In either case your going to have to basically recreate the data structure of an attributed string.
NSAttributedString does a lot of work for us. We really miss it when it is gone.
I need a textfield so an user could write several lines. Unfortunately a UITextField does not provide several lines, so I think I have to use an UITextView.
But the design of both are not the same.
Is it possible to design the UITextView like the UITextfield standard with white background and rounded corners?
Thanks a lot in advance & Best Regards.
In my self appointed role as interface-nazi, I feel compelled to point out that UITextField and UITextView have different appearances to communicate to users to expect a slightly different function.
In a textfield, a return ends editing. In a textview, it may only create a new line. In a textfield, links and phone numbers are not recognized. In a textview they are. Textviews can scroll. And so on...
You shouldn't create a non-standard interface element unless you have a strong compelling reason to do so. You should ask yourself how making a textview look like a textfield will help the user understand what actions they need to take to make the app work as they expect and wish it to.
Surprisingly small tweaks can create serious user confusion. A non-standard interface can introduce just slight pause, a half second, every time they use it. That minor confusion can degrade their perception of the utility of the app.
You can put a mask image with rounded borders over your textView. Background of UITextView can be changed by standard setBackgroundColor message.
Thanks to Timur here, you can use this chat input sample to implement a multiple line uitextview like what you see in the iPhone messaging app.
It helped me in my app :)
Here how it looks:
I'm taking a look at this widget, and it appears to be a UIPickerView, however I haven't seen anything provided by the iPhone SDK API that allows for horizontal scrolling only. Mostly it's all done vertically. Also there appears to be a custom graphic around this picker, so it might not be that either.
I'm curious if anyone is able to determine if this is indeed a UIPickerView or perhaps a hacked up UIScrollView? The widget is handy -- and I like its use. I found it in some random groceries app in the app store.
Here is the screenshot:
Thanks all.
I'd definitely use iCarousel library:
https://github.com/nicklockwood/iCarousel
The library is really well documented, the code is clean and maintained.
That is totally custom. You could indeed do something of the sort overlaying an UIImageView and an UIScrollView. I'd guess it's a 100% custom. As with all programming, there are many ways to do any single thing.
As I recently posted in response to this question, a class for an iOS horizontal picker control (STHorizontalPicker) has just been posted on GitHub. It's nowhere near as sophisticated as UIPickerView, but it provides the basic functionality for picking numeric values and the underlying foundation is probably a good starting point for adding more sophisticated functionality (it's a UIScrollView containing a UIView with multiple CATextLayers for the markers).
It was designed to be used in UITableCellViews and currently looks like this:
This website has source code for a picker that is aligned horizontally without subclassing it.
That definitely looks like a custom component. I'd suggest getting the .app file off your iPhone, opening up the bundle, and looking to see if there's a xib file for that interface. You may get lucky and find the component sitting in there. My guess is that it's a subclass of UIScrollView, but of course there's no way I could be sure of that without personally knowing the developer or the codebase.
You will recognize pickers by their giant screen-gobbling footprint :-) This is most likely a horizontal UIScrollView with a series of fixed-width labels (or images). The tricky bit is to have the bezel on top with a transparent center pass touches back to the underlying scroll view. Or you can take the easy way out and overlay four image strips (for each edge) and leave the middle open so touch events go directly to the scroller.
It's a custom control, but it's really not that hard to build.
I'm working on an iphone application (not web app) and I'd like to build a form asking a user to indicate a price range. Instead of using two text fields, I would prefer to use a double slider to set the minimum and the maximum price. I know that it is possible de use a simple slider (sound control for exemple) but i've never seen a double one. Can anyone help ?
This is not possible without creating a custom control. You'll need to inherit from UIControl or UIView and provide a custom drawRect method. You'll also need to respond to touch and drag events to update the state of the control. I have not done this myself, but I would be prepared for a fairly significant amount of work to get everything to respond and display as expected.
I'm curious as to why you need to have both values specified on a single slider? Why not use two sliders either side-by-side or stacked? It would not require any more input steps than a double slider, and would conform more to standard UI guidelines.
I think you can specify multiple thumbs for a single slider if you subclass UISlider, at least I vaguely remember that being possible in MacOSX. But Code Addict is right, you'll probably be better off using the standard controls - a double-thumbed slider seems like it'd be pretty difficult to deal with in the touchscreen environment.
I built such a control and added it to GitHub so feel free to have a look and if you like the control extend it and contribute.
GitHub page: http://github.com/doukasd/DoubleSlider
Blog post (showing a video of how it works): http://dev.doukasd.com/2010/08/double-slider/