Continuously looping UIScrollViews? - iphone

I'm working on developing a CoverFlow type UIScrollView implementation quite similar to this
https://github.com/thefaj/OpenFlow by Alex Fajkowski. I'm developing it more as a learning exercise as I keep finding the requirement to do similar things for menus/selections in my user interaces.
Alex's OpenFlow example is great but I'm wondering how to make it loop continuously, instead of scrolling A to B as the UIScrollView seems to do.
Is it possible, or a good idea, to loop views within a UIScrollView for a continuous 'flow' of images/items somehow or is there a better approach than using a UIScrollView for this?
I'm thinking that without the UIScrollView the smooth scrolling and inertia etc might be hard to re-create?

you can set the number of images to a big number in the afcoverflow and load dynamically. this isnt make the coverflow infinite but it does what you want

Related

Swift Slamming Logo Animation

I am creating an application in Swift, and I would like to make an introduction screen that shows off my logo. I want the logo to slam down on the screen, which will then cause a crack, and then that crack slowly grows. I think I can figure out slamming the logo down (by shrinking a UIView of my logo to a certain point), but I am having trouble deciding how to create the crack that will form from slapping down. Do I use views? I am lost.
This is the closest thing that I found to what I would like to do. Sadly, I do not have this software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh2y0Xs4IWA
I have created a similar effect before. And to achieve the crack a created multiple images of a growing crack and created an array of images for that screen crack. All you have to do then is animate the images if the imageView.
The other way you can Handel this is to actually draw the crack your self by code which is not difficult really, because in reality it’s just lines and then animate them. But in my experience just using the first method gives a much nicer effect because the images you use can have tons of effects using PS or equivalent.
I would suggest to go with third party like lottie. In lottie files there some animation you except there, you can also message the designer to help out animation. Its very simple to use in swift.
https://www.lottiefiles.com/
you can also check out my profile:
https://www.lottiefiles.com/parameshvadivel
Lottie animation are done in aftereffects using bodymoving extension and exported as json file to use in xcode.

endless vertical scrolling background

I want to make an endless vertical scrolling layer that gives the impression that the main character is moving upwards. I have been brainstorming on how to achieve this.
My issue is that I want objects to appear as if they are coming from above and below the screen at the same time. Secondly, I want to be able to move the main character to create and destroy box2d joints between it and some of the objects appearing on the screen. What is the best way to achieve this with consuming too much memory? I would appreciate any help on this.
Apple did a wonderful tutorial of this in a WWDC 2011 video session. It was "UITableView Changes, Tips & Tricks" and it's about 35m40sec into the video.
Since the use of the UITableView is really just a UIScrollView for the purposes of the background, you could just use a UIScrollView and you can either have it move on timer or events as needed.
Think of your player as moving within a stationary bounding box. The background can scroll using the aforementioned pooling method (as the background tile scrolls off the screen it is placed into a pool, and before a new tile is instantiated the pool is checked for available reusable tiles). Thirdly, your enemy objects will simply approach from either the bottom of the screen or the top.
Imagine your idea without the scrolling background (flying effect) and you should find that the problem is relatively straightforward.
I also needed and endless scrolling background layer. This can do exactly that, and it is super simple to set up and use. Just copy the four files in to the cocos2d folder in your project, then follow the quick tutorial seen on the github. Make sure the image you use is seamless (when you line them up vertically you can't tell where one ends.

Finding a free space within current bounds of view on iOS

I have an infinite scrollview in which I add images as the user scrolls. Those images have varying heights and I've been trying to come up with the best way of finding a clear space inside the current bounds of the view that would allow me to add the image view.
Is there anything built-in that would make my search more efficient?
The problem is I want the images to be sort of glued to one another with no blank space between them. Making the search through 320x480 pixels tends to be quite a CPU hog. Does anyone know an efficient method to do it?
Thanks!
It seems that you're scrolling this thing vertically (you mentioned varying image heights).
There's nothing built in to UIScrollView that will do this for you. You'll have to track your UIImageView subviews manually. You could simply maintain the max y coordinate occupied by you images as you add them.
You might consider using UITableView instead, and implementing a very customized tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath: in your delegate. You would probably need to do something special with the actual cells as well, but it would seem to make your job a little easier.
Also, for what it's worth, you might find a way to avoid making your solution infinite. Be careful about your memory footprint! iOS will shut your app off if things get out of hand.
UPDATE
Ok, now I understand what you're going for. I had imagined that you were presenting photographs or something rectangular like that. If I were trying to cover a scroll view with UILeafs (wah wah) I would take a statistical approach. I would 'paint' leaves randomly along horizontal/vertical strips as the user scrolls. Perhaps that's what you're doing already? Whatever you're doing I think it looks good.
Now I guess that the reason you're asking is to prevent the little random white spots that show through - is that right? If I may suggest a different solution: try to color the background of your scroll view to something earthy that looks good if it shows through here and there.
Also, it occurred to me that you could use a larger template image -- something that already has a nice distribution of leaves -- with transparency all along the outside outline of the leaves but nowhere else. Then you could tile these, but with overlap, so that the alpha just shows through to the leaves below. You could have a number of these images so that it doesn't look obvious. This would take away all of the uncertainty and make your retiling very efficient.
Also, consider learning about CoreAnimation (CALayer in particular) and CoreGraphics/Quartz 2D ). Proper use of these libraries will probably yield great improvements in rendering speed.
UPDATE 2:
If your images are all 150px wide, then split your scrollview into columns and add/remove based on those (as discussed in chat).
Good luck!

Really, really big UIScrollViews

I'm trying to make a level-of-detail line chart, where the user can zoom in/out horizontally by using two fingers, and grow the contentSize attribute of the the UIScrollView field. They can also scroll horizontally to shift left or right and see more of the chart (check any stock on Google Finance charts to get an idea of what I'm talking about). Potentially, the scroll view could grow to up to 100x its original size, as the user is zooming in.
My questions are:
- Has anyone had any experience with UIScrollViews that have such large contentSize restrictions? Will it work?
- The view for the scroll view could potentially be really huge, since the user is zooming in. How is this handled in memory?
- Just a thought, but would it be possible to use UITableViewCells, oriented to scroll horizontally, to page in/out the data?
This is kind of an open ended question right now - I'm still brainstorming myself. If anyone has any ideas or has implemented such a thing before, please respond with your experience. Thanks!
This is quite an old topic, but still I want to share some my experiences.
Using such a large UIView (100x than its origin size) in UIScrollView could cause Memory Warning. You should avoid render the entire UIView at once.
A better way to implement this is to render the only area which you can see and the area just around it. So, UIViewScroll can scroll within this area smoothly. But what if user scrolled out of the area that has been rendered? Use delegate to get notified when user scroll out of the pre-rendered area and try to render the new area which is going to be showed.
The basic idea under this implementation is to use 9 UIViews (or more) to tile a bigger area, when user scrolled (or moved) from old position to new position. Just move some UIViews to new place to make sure that one of UIView is the main view which you can see mostly, and other 8 UIViews are just around it.
Hope it is useful.
I have something similar, although probably not to the size your talking about. The UIScrollView isn't a problem. The problem is that if you're drawing UIViews on it (rather than drawing lines yourself) UIViews that are well, well off the screen continue to exist in memory. If you're actually drawing the lines by creating your own UIView and responding to drawRect, it's fine.
Assuming that you're a reasonably experienced programmer, getting a big scroll view working that draws pars of the chart is only a days work, so my recommendation would be to create a prototype for it, and run the prototype under the object allocations tool and see if that indicates any problems.
Sorry for the vagueness of my answer; it's a brainstorming question
But still, this approach (in the example above) is not good enough in some cases. Cause we only rendered a limited area in the UIScrollView.
User can use different gestures in UIScrollView: drag or fling. With drag, the pre-rendered 8 small UIViews is enough for covering the scrolling area in most of the case. But with flinging, UIScrollView could scroll over a very large area when user made a quick movement, and this area is totally blank (cause we didn't render it) while scrolling. Even we can display the right content after the UIScrollView stops scrolling, the blank during scrolling isn't very UI friendly to user.
For some apps, this is Ok, for example Google map. Since the data couldn't be downloaded immediately. Waiting before downloading is reasonable.
But if the data is local, we should eliminate this blank area as possible as we can. So, pre-render the area that is going to be scrolled is crucial. Unlike UITableView, UIScrollView doesn't have the ability to tell us which cell is going to be displayed and which cell is going to be recycled. So, we have to do it ourselves. Method [UIScrollViewDelegate scrollViewWillEndDragging:withVelocity:targetContentOffset:] will be called when UIScrollView starts to decelerating (actually, scrollViewWillBeginDecelerating is the method been called before decelerating, but in this method we don't know the information about what content will be displayed or scrolled). So based on the UIScrollView.contentOffset.x and parameter targetContentOffset, we can know exactly where the UIScrollView starts and where the UIScrollView will stop, then pre-render this area to makes the scrolling more smoothly.

How to code smooth scrolling for "flick" gesture on iPhone

I have horizontal list for which I'm implementing my own scrolling logic. I have the "touch and drag" scrolling working great, but I'm having trouble with the "flick" gesture. All the built in scrollable views have the feature that if you "flick" the view it scrolls faster or slower based on the intensity of the flick.
Does anyone has any suggestion how do that for my view?
What I'm doing right now is changing the UIView.center.x coordinate of my custom UIView to scroll it across the screen
I would strongly suggest you figure out how to make use of the built in UIScrollView class. Apple has invested a LOT of effort to make scrolling feel 'right'. You may be able to recreate some, or even all, of that feel, but it'll take a lot of work. Better to piggy back off of what's already been done.
If you want to implement your own scroll view, you'll have to make the view scroll based on the length of the sweeping distance and the speed at witch it went across the screen. Taking these parameters as input and using simple geometry math you could calculate how much further the view should scroll after the sweep has ended(touchesEnded event).
Ofcourse this is not as simple as it sounds, making the flick gesture just feel right and natural is much harder.
If you really are set on doing this yourself, Drew McCormack has a great article on MacResearch where he explains some of the physics behind momentum-based scrolling. His implementation uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but the core principles could be brought across to your custom UIView subclass.