I am working on an app which displays user information on the home view. Its a regular tab bar application, which brings up the home view on load. I need to display something like,
Hello Joe,
Your current points are : xxx
I would like this to be in a white curved background box. (The background for the view is blue). Is there something like a UIPanel or something like that. I would really like to avoid having another view or a webView, not sure if thats going to affect the speed of loading the page.
If there were a UIPanel control it would derive from UIView, so I'm not sure why you want to avoid another view. If I'm understanding you, it sounds like you want a custom alert window of some sort. You could just use the UIAlertView control to display your message, but if you are dead set on a custom look, then you will need to use a view.
This shouldn't affect performance noticeably if you are just displaying some text with maybe a button on a custom image. Especially if this is just a tab bar application with nothing too crazy happening in the background (animations, etc.).
I would suggest creating a View either in code (this will be slightly faster, but once again probably not noticeably so) or with Interface Builder that has a black background with an opacity of like .2-.5 and on that view adding a UIImageView set to your custom image (a png of a white curved box with transparent corners). Then put a UILabel with your text and a button to dismiss it.
On load just instantiate the above view and add it to your current view. It will show your message modally. Then capture the button tap event to have it remove itself from it's superview.
There are plenty of examples of how to do exactly this out there and there are even other ways of doing it than what I've suggested. If you need further assistance let me know.
Related
In the Mail app on iPhone, when the user taps Edit, the toolbar shows two buttons, Delete and Move. These buttons have both image and text while appearing as bordered.
I tried to recreate this effect, but I have not really succeeded. Here's what I've tried:
The obvious way of setting the image and text properties. This results in some weird button with the image on top and the text below it.
Initialize the UIBarButtonButton with a custom view set to an instance of UIButton (described here). This button can then not be set to be bordered, instead it appears as a flat view (without shadows either).
I could obviously create a button and then add an UIImageView as a subview to the toolbar, but then I have to care about device rotation and some other stuff I would like to avoid. Also, I think Apple doesn't do it this way; when you select an email in Mail while in editing mode, the button label is updated with (-number-), which moves the image slightly to the left. It looks like the text and the image belong together.
So I wonder whether anybody did something like this?
Most likely these are UIButtons with stretchable image backgrounds. That's how I would do it.
I have designed a custom tabbar and the developer says the design I created can't be done.
The screen is made up of a usual background with a tabbar. I'd like my tabbar to look a little different to the usual iPhone style. I would like at the bottom of the tabbar a grass illustration (transparent) and on top would sit all the separate buttons and on top of those would be the icons. All of these images (as seen in link below) are separate .png files.
When the user scrolls the content, it will scroll under the transparent grass. The buttons of course will be clickable and have a different view for an active state.
Please see the link below to see a mock-up of the image:
http://www.stuartkidd.com/dummy.jpg
I'd appreciate if the community could explain to me if this could be done and if so, how. I thought it would have something to do with 'creating a custom tabbar'.
And a further question, if it can be done, can also the tab buttons be horizontally
scrollable with a swipe action?
Thanks,
It all can be done but you are going against the Iphone UI guidelines. You won't be able to leverage the UITabbarView to do what you want so you'll basically have to write the whole thing from scratch. Your tab bar would be a scroll view with a row of buttons representing each tab. When a button is clicked you load in the appropriate view. The UITabBar controller gives you a lot of functionality for free and I suspect once you start working towards this you'll see exactly how much extra work this will end up costing you. Going against the way Apple does things can be a slippery slope.
Another idea might be to keep a hidden UITabBar to manage the tabs and call it from your custom tab bar. This would free you from a lot of the hassle of swapping views/controllers in and out.
You can create a row of custom buttons and have 2 subviews. One for the bottom navigation bar and one for the content view where you will be swapping your content based on what is pressed.
You can have a state which maintains what was clicked. Based on that you can set the button enabled state for every button in your bottom bar.
button.selected = YES
It will be easy to handle the touch up inside events and properly load appropriate views in and out of the bigger subview as they will be part of the same view controller.
I have implemented a similar functionality and it works well but still in process of submitting it to the app-store.
In the iPad's Photos app, when you tap an album the stack of pictures expands to fill the screen - you're in the same view, it's just rearranged the grid a little. But at the top, a left-arrow-style Back button appears, as if pushViewController had been used - except it fades in neatly, rather than sliding in. When you tap that, it fades out again, rather than sliding out.
Is there a way to replicate this behaviour? I've tried a few options so far, and might just be missing something. What I've tried:
Setting self.navigationItem's leftBarButtonItem works, but gives me a square button rather than an angled Back-style one - there are a few hacks online to make this work, such as using pictures for the button, but I'd rather only use them if there's definitely no "official" way to do this.
Setting self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem - this is generally used to customise the back button when a view controller is pushed, so it has no effect.
[self.navigationController.navigationBar setItems::] - this works, although it gives me the sliding animation rather than fading. As a result, I use animated:NO to make it just appear. Downside: when tapping Back, you do get the sliding out animation, which looks weird because the rest of the UI stays still.
Has anyone managed to replicate this effect?
Thanks in advance!
Your first approach is probably the best.
It doesn't have to be super-hacky, you can use a normal UIButton and customize it to look like a back-button using backgroundImageForState: and titleForState: (etc.), then set the UIButton object as the customView of your UIBarButtonItem.
Many apps these days customize the look & feel of the buttons anyway, so using a custom background image is quite normal. If you use resizableImageWithCapInsets: (or stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:topCapHeight: if you need to support iOS earlier than 5.0) then the button can still stretch to fit whatever text goes inside, and as it's a normal UIButton the text is localizable, etc. I don't consider this approach to be hacky, it is a perfectly sensible way to get around the limited functionality of UIBarButtonItem objects.
Better late than never.
To show a back button without pushing a view controller, use pushNavigationItem:animated: and popNavigationItemAnimated: on UINavigationBar. These result in the standard slide animation and creation of a back button. However, there is no way to ensure your content animation runs for the same time as the bar animation other than making an educated guess at the duration.
Since iOS 7 there is a better API for achieving this effect, where you still push and pop view controllers but you provide a custom transition animation through navigationController:animationControllerForOperation:fromViewController:toViewController: from UINavigationControllerDelegate. This allows the animations between the bar and content to be perfectly coordinated.
Finally, if your content before and after is managed by UICollectionViewController, you can use useLayoutToLayoutNavigationTransitions, which is designed for use-cases like Photos.
I'm just looking for advice with this as I have no idea where to start but I think a UIActionSheet is probably best.
What I'd like to have is a pop up window (in my head I picture it as being translucent and dark gray). It will not take up the whole screen and the view underneath will still be visible.
In the pop up section there will be a textfield (with several lines) and underneath this there will be a number of UISwitches.
The pop up will be scrollable and will end with OK/Cancel buttons at the bottom.
Like I said, I really have no idea where to start with this but any advice is more than welcome!
A UIActionSheet is probably not what you are after in this case (although you may want a similar look and feel). Think of an action sheet as a traditional modal OK/cancel/Yes/No type dialog box:
Use the UIActionSheet class to present the user with a set of alternatives for how to proceed with a given task.
From the sound it of it, you need to create a UIView in InterfaceBuilder with a semi-transparent background and various child controls (UISwitches and UITextFields). You create your view using the XIB you have configured and add it as a subview of your UIViewController's view. If you want to mimic the animation you get from an action sheet, you can do that with an AnimationBlock.
I am almost at the end of coding my kids educational application, woohoo!.
But... Im stuck on something.
When app loads i have my main view. It has 4 buttons for flipviews(each with ten views of content) and 4 buttons for character selection(an image that will follow you through every screen of content).
Problem is im unsure on how to link UIButton selection to UIImage display in multiple views. I want the user to choose a character button and then continue to the flipviews and in the views the image displayed should be the one that they have selected on the main view. So everytime they return to the main view they can change the character that will follow them around the app.
Any thoughts, help or code would be much appreciated!
Thank You
Alex
Make a new object, a subclass of UIImageView, which has a -setImage method. Once you set the image, then where ever you embed that object, it will display the same image. You could even have that subclass view have a score displayed next to it, or a name or other stats, so as you go from one screen to another, you have all that info follow you around with the image. No need to create labels in all the screens for global info like that.
In summary:
make a new subclass of UIView or UIImageView in Xcode using the New File... menu. You would do new UIView if you will have other items than just an image.
add methods that allow you to set the image, update text stats etc.
BONUS: you can make the class handle taps, so if a user taps the image, you could do something like provide help or run a cute little animation
embed that object in any screens you wish. Keep in mind that you can have that view be sized differently in each screen using transforms. Cool, no?
that's pretty much it!
Good luck!