I've created a monochrome ticker [think stock ticker] to display information the user encounters within my app. It's a wide and narrow instance of UIScrollView whose content is filled by an instance of UILabel with the relevant text. The parent view is its own delegate and takes care of the horizontal scrolling animation. The UILabel instance is set to one line only.
I'd like for the text to be in two colors (red and black) where necessary, and possibly plain and italics again where necessary. Of course UILabel is not capable of doing this, and neither is UITextView.
The obvious thing to try is replacing the UILabel instance with an instance of UIWebView and send it an html-string to format the text. However the results are not yet quite as satisfying as with UILabel - the text has margin offsets, for instance, and it needs to be displayed on one line.
Another solution, which works but I'm not satisfied with, is to have the UIScrollView display a concatenated sequence of UILabel instances each with the appropriate font or text color.
With regard to the UIWebView solution what do you advise? For instance, how would you configure an instance of a UIWebView to visually and faithfully resemble the UILabel?
check out the fancy label example at http://furbo.org/2008/10/07/fancy-uilabels/
if it helps you.
Related
I wish to display a dynamic set of data (pulled live over a TCP connection) on the iPhone that is not too unlike lines from a terminal.
This means that the lines will be very long and really cannot be wrapped.
What is the best way of accomplishing this?
I want to use a UITableView because then memory issues would be less of a concern because the lines of text would be loaded/unloaded automatically each line of text would be a cell.
I have thought about this a bit and I came up with a possible solution, but I am not sure if it would actually work.
I could put a UITableView in a UIScrollView and only let the containing UIScrollView scroll horizontally.
Then I would adjust the frame of the UITableView and UITableViewCells so that they are much wider as calculated by the longest line of text.
I have read that you really don't want to nest a UITableView in a UIScrollView since UITableView is in fact a subclass of UIScrollView. Since UITableView is a subclass of UIScrollView, is there someway I can enable the horizontal scrolling and make the frame wider?
If either of those ideas would actually work, could you also tell me which properties I should change (frame or contentSize etc).
I ended up putting a UILabel in a UIScrollView and just kept an array of all the lines and made the UILabel the minimum necessary width and height.
I then set the number of lines of the UILabel to the number of elements in the array. This works because there is no textwrapping.
I think this should be fine performance wise, but we'll see.
You can see it in action in my app Adminium for Bukkit/Minecraft:
Right now I have a standard UITableView that is empty by default and the user can add cells to it.
I noticed this app starts with no cells and is empty (like you cant see lines) but my standard view always has the lines like standard table view.
I thought it may be a grouped table style but the edges are not curved like the grouped style is.
Does anyone have any ideas?
The lines between cells are controlled by the separatorStyle property of your tableView. To remove the lines simply set:
tableView.separatorStyle = UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone;
Your other options are UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleSingleLine and UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleSingleLineEtched.
You can hide the separator lines by setting their color to the same color as your background, e.g.
tableView.separatorColor = [myApp theColorOfMyBackground]; // A UIColor object
Make sense?
The cells in your picture are likely custom cells, but you didn't really ask about that. :-)
EDIT: As noted in another answer seperatorStyle can be used to simply "turn off" the lines. That's a better way to do it.
This is a good question. +1 What app is this? Does the view you show above actually "scroll" even though only 2 rows are showing? I am wondering if it is a truly a table view. It could be a series of UIViews added to a UIScrollView with a dark background.
Assuming the programmer knows how tall the "rows" are, then they can add them with a pixel spacing over the charcoal background. With the UIScrollView, the programmer can define the contentSize.
If more views were added to extend past off the screen and the contentSize was appropriately defined, the USScrollView would automatically allow scrolling at that point.
Selecting a "row" could be easily handled by UIGesture controls on each UIView.
*EDIT
After seeing the app, Delivery by JuneCload, it is definitely using a UITableView with custom cell views. As Mark and Matt have answered.
Look this pic:
The usernames are UIButton. How can I put a UILabel (with the comment text) just after the UIButton (with the username) ?
The UIButton username's is dynamic. How can I do this?
That looks like a UITableView, if that's the case you should subclass UITableViewCell. If it isn't, I would
consider making it one
build a container class that (or make your subclassed UITableViewCell such that it) contains both a UIButton and a UILabel and dynamically position the text inside the label according to the size of the button (for instance, adding the right number of spaces to the beginning of the text).
You're going to have to use Core Text or web views to achieve this. There's really not a super easy way to do this. It's simple enough to place view next to each other based on their calculated sizes, but to have text wrap to multiple lines with embedded font style variations and attachments (i.e., images), you're going to have to read up on Core Text or use XHTML in web views.
How do I arrange some UILabels and/or UIButtons of a variable length? I just want to add them to a UITableViewCell and they should arrange in a left-to-right flow, much like lines of text in a paragraph.
I only found possibilities to create lables with a fixed size and position using "initWithFrame:...". Same seems to be true for Interface Builder, as far as I can tell. Any solution is appreciated no matter if it's done in code or using a custom cell XIB-file.
UITableViewCell, UILabel, and UIButton are all subclasses of UIView and the documentation for UIView says:
Layout and subview management
A view may contain zero or more subviews.
Each view defines its own default resizing behavior in relation to its parent view.
A view can manually change the size and position of its subviews as needed.
So, it is certainly possible to do.
You can create your labels and buttons using initWithFrame: with the argument CGRectZero and then resize them (based on the text or whatever) using setBounds: or setFrame: (because right now you're just going to set the size of the view). Then, add these views as subviews of the cell's contentView.
Then, in a custom subclass of UITableViewCell you can implement your solution by overriding the default behavior (which does nothing) of layoutSubviews: to set the origin field of the subview's frames (i.e., CGRect) that will position the subviews in the cell's content view (the size has already been set). You may need to call setNeedsLayout: or layoutIfNeeded:.
This is really a rough outline of how it is possible to implement a solution because there are a lot of details left out. For example, if you resize a button based on the the text of the titleLabel you'll probably want to pad some to the width and height otherwise the button will be the size of the label and will look odd. In the layoutSubviews: method there could be a fair amount of logic to layout the labels and buttons the way you want (e.g., it would be simpler if all the subviews of a cell where of the same type such as all labels) esp. if the subviews could wrap to a new line.
For multiline UILabels to get the width and height you should use the NSString method sizeWithFont:constrainedToSize:lineBreakMode: you can then use the sizes you get to lay everything out where it needs to be.
I want to do the same thing to allow users to enter tags into a text field - a bit like how when you type in an email address, the address gets converted into a blue tag (the the users name in when that users email address is already in your contacts list). Haven't written it yet, but will be happy to share with you once I do. I can't commit to how long it I will take to write this unfortunately. However if no one else has code they can share and you need to get the job done quickly - Just as a tip, consider this:
Create tag view objects where each object knows the size of the parent text field/tag container view and where each tag object has a utility method which a further tag object can use to insert itself at the right position. This approach makes it easy to manage the view and relayout tags using a simple iteration flow.
Hi
If you still need an answer...
To get the size of text (and to then calculate the frame of the UILabel/UIButton etc) use the sizeWithFont: NSString function which will give you the width/height of a string of text using a specified font.
There is a little bit of maths that you'll need to do to work out the best fit, where to place the UILabels, and the spacing, but you will have the data that you need to do it.
Hope this helps!
I am having some trouble getting my application to properly resize the text of UILabels when the user does a swipe to delete or other type of delete. Currently, the delete button is covering up the text that is in the cell (if it is really long). I would like for them to operate like how SMS (move clipped text down a line) or iPod (delete button resizing text).
I am using a custom UITableViewCell I am working with two labels, UIImageView and a couple of subviews for backgroundView and selectedBackgroundView. I have been playing with the springs and struts of the labels in the cell and partially attained my desired effect however, the text has a weird, quick resizing bug where it becomes deformed and stretched out and then is returned proper size when the delete button is done animating.
As far as other things that I have tried, I have made sure that my text does not adjust-to-fit and I have made my minimum font size the font size that I set for the label. I have also tried over-riding layoutSubviews but that didn't seem to have any effect at all.
If a screenshot (of the deforming label) or code would be helpful, I can post both but since nothing I have done is working, I figured they would be of little value.
fixed it by setting the "mode" of the label in the view panel to "left"
It sounds like you need to set the number of lines property and the wrap property for the labels.
If your actively changing the size of the label itself, you might want to animate that change.