Is there a simple way to send touches on an iOS device (e.g. iPad) to another UIScreen which is rendered on an external display?
For example, the iPad shows a blank screen and the app is shown on the external screen. If I touch down on the iPad approximately where the button (displayed on the other UIScreen) would be, it sends the coordinates to the other UIScreen so that it looks like I'm touching down on it.
This is intended to be a quick way to output what would normally be displayed on an iPad, to an external display, but still retain touch interactivity. It's somewhat an alternative to app mirroring.
This is not possible if you want to submit your app to the App Store as it will rejected by Apple for using private APIs, because there are no public methods to create UITouch objects.
However this can be done with private APIs, there is an article here which shows how to do it.
Related
How can I check if the device is a touch device or a mouse device?
Using kIsWeb is not sufficient because if using web version of the app on a mobile device kIsWeb returns true, but I need it to return false because it is a touch device.
Checking the platform doesn't work either because if using web version of the app on an iOS device for example returns false for iOS platform check.
Use case - I have two different types of video players for my app. One is suitable for touch devices (you tap to show and hide controls) and one is suitable for mouse devices (controls show when you mouse into the player and hide when you mouse out).
Youtube has the same idea. If I use the youtube app or website on my iPhone I get touch controls. If I use the youtube app or website on my iPad Pro I get touch controls. If I use the youtube website on my Mac I get mouse controls at all screen sizes (even mobile screen sizes).
So I guess I really just need to know platform on the web. I can get platform if not on the web.
Great question #jwasher! I had the same issue - a touch and swipe based UI that was great as a native mobile app, great as an single page web app (SPA) on mobile web browsers, but that was weird and clunky for mouse based interactions when the SPA was used in a desktop web browser.
The solution I have settled on is to wrap sensitive widgets in a MouseRegion (https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/MouseRegion-class.html) to detect mouse activity at runtime, then reacting by augmenting the UI with buttons to provide a mouse focussed way of triggering actions previously only linked to touch triggers.
You could use this to "mouse-enable" individual widgets, or you could wrap the whole app in a MouseRegion, trip a state field when activity was detected then rebuild the widget tree in a substantially different way for point and click users.
This strategy may incur some minor complexity/CPU overhead on devices that will never have a mouse attached (like a smartphone), but the solution will be more flexible than a build or configuration time capability determination. If a user starts the app on a tablet, then puts it in a stand and attaches a bluetooth mouse - it will react appropriately.
A device isn't "a mouse device" or "a pointer device". Events have an input type--see Pointer event.kind--but not the whole device. A laptop can have a touch screen, and a tablet can have a stylus or external mouse; an app running in those environments can receive both types of event.
Without knowing what you are trying to accomplish with this classification, is hard to advise on how to accomplish it. Trying to style your UI based on a guess of the primary interaction mode, for instance, is a completely different problem than reacting to a mouse event differently than a touch event.
I want to develop one iOS app. Is there any way to get the ui touch point when app in background. Like i want tap randomly in iOS device screen and my app will get correspond touch point accordingly.
Fortunately, this is not possible on iOS.
I've seen tons of questions and answers regarding merging an iPhone and an iPad app into an universal app, but that isn't what I want to do. What I am going to do is use in app purchase to unlock an iPad interface and then display the correct interface using conditionals. If the interface is purchased, the app displays the iPad Nib, and if not, it just displays the same way as an iPhone application does (with the option to scale the app, etc). The conditionals are very simple and I have already implemented them, however the issue I run into is this: If the IAP is NOT purchased, the iPad displays the iPhone Nib, but not in the typical way. It is just in the corner with no option to scale it, rather than in the center with the black border that you usually see. Does anyone know how I can set it up so i fixes this issue? I'm a little stumped to be honest.
The Info.plist file in an iOS app contains a key, UIDeviceFamily, which lists the devices that the app natively supports. If the key's value is 1, or a array containing 1, the app natively supports iPhones and iPods Touch. If the value is 2, or a array containing 2, the app natively supports iPads.
If UIDeviceFamily says the app supports iPads, then it will run the app in native iPad mode, not in iPhone-wrapper mode.
The Info.plist file is part of your app bundle, and you can't modify files in the app bundle.
So there is no way to enable or disable the system's native-iPad support at runtime. You'll have to move your app's top-level view into a wrapper view that centers and scales its child, and use that wrapper view as the UIWindow's subview.
UIDeviceFamily in the Information Property List Key Reference
This isn't possible, unfortunately. The iPad will know that the app is iPad ready and will tell draw the screen at full size. Even if you showed iPhone xib file on the iPad, they would still be scaled to fit the full screen using the UIViewAutoresizingMask params you've set for them.
One thought would be to force the size of your UIWindow to be iPhone sized (remember to account for retina) and centered, but I'm not 100% sure how/if this would work. You may have to change each UIView frame. I'm not sure.
I've seen tons of questions and answers regarding merging an iPhone and an iPad app into an universal app, but that isn't what I want to do. What I am going to do is use in app purchase to unlock an iPad interface and then display the correct interface using conditionals. If the interface is purchased, the app displays the iPad Nib, and if not, it just displays the same way as an iPhone application does (with the option to scale the app, etc). The conditionals are very simple and I have already implemented them, however the issue I run into is this: If the IAP is NOT purchased, the iPad displays the iPhone Nib, but not in the typical way. It is just in the corner with no option to scale it, rather than in the center with the black border that you usually see. Does anyone know how I can set it up so i fixes this issue? I'm a little stumped to be honest.
The Info.plist file in an iOS app contains a key, UIDeviceFamily, which lists the devices that the app natively supports. If the key's value is 1, or a array containing 1, the app natively supports iPhones and iPods Touch. If the value is 2, or a array containing 2, the app natively supports iPads.
If UIDeviceFamily says the app supports iPads, then it will run the app in native iPad mode, not in iPhone-wrapper mode.
The Info.plist file is part of your app bundle, and you can't modify files in the app bundle.
So there is no way to enable or disable the system's native-iPad support at runtime. You'll have to move your app's top-level view into a wrapper view that centers and scales its child, and use that wrapper view as the UIWindow's subview.
UIDeviceFamily in the Information Property List Key Reference
This isn't possible, unfortunately. The iPad will know that the app is iPad ready and will tell draw the screen at full size. Even if you showed iPhone xib file on the iPad, they would still be scaled to fit the full screen using the UIViewAutoresizingMask params you've set for them.
One thought would be to force the size of your UIWindow to be iPhone sized (remember to account for retina) and centered, but I'm not 100% sure how/if this would work. You may have to change each UIView frame. I'm not sure.
I need to send video output to an external video screen from my iphone app. I am using the Apple Composite AV Cable. I get video output when I am playing a video through the ipod app, but when I do
[[UIScreen screens] count];
I only get one screen, the main phone screen. For my app I need to have a completely separate window like the process here:
Support for External Displays and Projectors
An iPad can now be connected to an external display through a supported cable. Applications can use this connection to present content in addition to the content on the device’s main screen. Depending on the cable, you can output content at up to a 720p (1280 x 720) resolution. A resolution of 1024 by 768 resolution may also be available if you prefer to use that aspect ratio.
To display content on an external display, do the following:
Use the screens class method of the UIScreen class to determine if an external display is available.
If an external screen is available, get the screen object and look at the values in its availableModes property. This property contains the configurations supported by the screen.
Select the UIScreenMode object corresponding to the desired resolution and assign it to the currentMode property of the screen object.
reate a new window object (UIWindow) to display your content.
Create a new window object (UIWindow) to display your content.
Assign the screen object to the screen property of your new window.
Configure the window (by adding views or setting up your OpenGL ES rendering context).
Show the window.
All that is here in a more readable format. I am working on an iphone, not an ipad, but the documentation says that external screens are now supported for iphones in ios4.
How can I get the phone to realize there is another screen attached? thanks
For posterity,
my problem was that I was using an iPhone 3GS. The ios4 video out stuff needs an iPhone 4 (it also works in 3.2 for the ipad i hear). With an iphone 4 I was able to get composite video out.
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] performSelector: #selector(startTVOut) withObject:nil afterDelay:.1]