I have some text that I need to load from an XML file. The idea is to be able to make the text interactive. I should be able to tell when a user taps a piece of the text, like in the WordWeb app. I know this seems to be the kind of job that a UIWebView is for but I want to avoid generating HTML and implementing handlers for the hrefs. I hope that made any sense.
Another way could be using a UITableView with UITextViews or UILabels as content views for the cells. However, I couldn't find out how we can customize the appearance of the table view, add a border to the view for example.
The end result expected is a view that looks like a page from a book but pieces of the displayed text can be tapped and bookmarked etc.
Am I even thinking in the right direction?
Related
I'm trying to load in content from a database and allow the user to flip through it like pages, then at the end of the content, give them options to go to another section of content (probably with buttons). The content is currently just formatted with html, but how do I implement the buttons to navigate? I'm a little new to Xcode so maybe I'm not even looking in the right direction.
refer a this opensource: https://github.com/devindoty/iBooks-Flip-Animation
this is very little code and perfectly works.
I am trying to implement a view which will load text from sqlite database (every sentence in a text will have unique tag in database) and will allow to execute some code while sentence is clicked (on-click executed method should then scroll clicked sentence to the center of the screen and change it's color/background color/font size to emphasize it)
Is it possible without using webview and js/js-native bridge? Which approach should be taken to implement such a view? Any help and comments highly appreciated!
Hmm, you could also considering using NSAttributedString together the Core Text Framework and attribute each sentence and attach some extra info about. Next you lookup the attribute below the tap position of the view. Once you have that you can retrieve the extra info again and do whatever you want with the tap.
After the tap you could then alter the properties of that part of the text. E.g. different font colour etc.
This tutorial on the internet looked interesting:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/4147/how-to-create-a-simple-magazine-app-with-core-text
I have a UIActionSheet which gives the user a few standard choices. The text on the buttons, however, does not cleverly scale down like a text field though when there's too much-- it just truncates with an ellipsis.
I need to say a little more in on of my action sheet buttons than there's room for. I don't see any way of changing the action sheet's behavior, unfortunately. Any thoughts on alternatives?
Thanks!
You could put some of the descriptive text in the UIActionSheet's title property, and then give just the verb or something concise in the button titles.
One alternative is: you might want to create a full-screen view that you show with presentModalViewController:animated:, where you have more space to show the text.
A third alternative is to create a UIView that animates up with UIButtons that you can customize, but doesn't fill the entire screen. I do that with some of my apps where the Settings are in a tab that slides up but doesn't need to cover the entire screen.
We are trying to write a training manual application for the iPhone. On the top half of the screen is a diagram of a car engine, on the bottom half is some text. At the user repeatedly hits a "next" button, we highlight different parts of the engine, and in concert we highlight different parts of the descriptive text below.
We basically want "living text" in the text half, with the illustration following along on top to where the reader is in the text. What we'd like from the text is 1. user can scroll it using their thumb so possibly a UIScrollView 2. the software can explicitly drive a scroll to any part of the text (when they hit the "next" button). 3. the words in the text are interspersed with hotlinks e.g. "this is the camshaft... this is the piston..." and the user should be able to click on any of the keywords like camshaft, piston, and have the diagram highlight that. (The problem is not highlighting the diagram, its capturing the click). The text would have 300~400 buttons/links/keywords and about 600 words of text.
Since this is fairly similar to using a web browser, we tried using Apple's version of webkit using a UIWebView and handleOpenURL to register a service back to the app itself. But Webkit for internal links a popup comes up asking permission to access that link. Every single the user wants to go to a link (in our case just an internal event that we'd intercept so that we can highlight e.g. the camshaft). Tried to intercept the event from the HTML view, but that didn't work.
It seems like the best we can do is to abandon scrolling text, and make the text part more like flash cards or a power point presentation, breaking the text into custom UIViewCells with buttons inside a UIScrollView. However, this would impose an annoying constraint on the author that they would have to write everything to fit in the UIViewCells, sort of chunky.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
This is definitely something you can use a UIWebView for. Don't use handleOpenURL, rather, set your viewController as the webview's delegate, and override -webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:. When this gets called, check the request, and pull out your link data from there.
It would probably be easier to implement that completely in JavaScript in the document you load in a UIWebView. You would have to use JavaScript (i.e. [UIWebView stringbyevaluatingjavascriptfromstring:]) anyway to achieve things like scrolling to a certain position.
I am creating a dictionary-style app that presents a tableview full of words, and when a word is selected, a UITextView is displayed that shows the definition of the word. What I would like to do is add a line that says "See also: synonym1, synonym2" where synonym1 and synonym2 are links that will take the user to the definition for the synonym that is touched.
What is the best way to add these dynamic links? Buttons? Somehow add a small UIWebView a UItable on the fly?
Thanks!
I would replace your UITextView with a UIWebView and use that contain your description text and your links. It's fairly trivial to generate HTML on the fly for something like that.
You could register a custom URL scheme for your app, or you could intercept links as they're clicked.
If your links are always grouped together there's no reason why you couldn't use a bunch of UIButtons inside a custom view, but then you'd have to handle layout and wrapping on your own. It seems a lot easier to do it in HTML.