How do I properly clean up a UIButton - iphone

I am having issues with UIButton with the iPhone SDK. I've determined that when I have a UIButton held down when the parent is removed (and the uibutton subsequently removed), I get some strange behavior. In my case, the app stops receiving any input whatsoever, as if the cleaned up held-down button has hijacked the input system somehow.
Does anyone know if there is an appropriate way to clean up the UIButton that would release what I'm guessing is the framework thinking the released button is still held down?
Update: Adding detail to my issue
Basically, the simplified situation is that I have a root view with two characters (actors, not letter characters) and a number of buttons, among other views. The user can use the buttons to affect direction of movement, and when the characters are close to each other, the scene moves forward immediately into another mode, i.e. the buttons slide off, the view cleans up, and I construct a new one.
What this necessitates is the ability to immediately move on and clean up even if the button is still held down. I figured I could pull some tricks to delay cleaning the button up, but I would be surprised if there isn't simply some way to properly clean up the button for removal regardless of what state it is currently in. Hope that clarifies.

It might help if you would explain what behavior you are expecting. If you are calling -removeFromSuperview while holding down the view you want to remove (or its parent), I would suggest you instead hide the view and set some flag you can look for when the user finishes holding that will at that point call -removeFromSuperview.

It turned out the problem wasn't a button being held down but rather a call to set the center coordinate of a mapview with animation on, i.e.
[mMapView setCenterCoordinate:mCoordinates animated:YES];
If the view was cleaned up while the animation was still moving, the app would no longer respond to user input. I'm not certain why this is the case, still, but setting the animated flag to NO ensured the problem didn't arise.

Related

button highlight state and gestures

I've been struggling with this for a while already and some
help would be useful.
Imagine I have a UIButton, which starts in highlighted/selected state.
If a user taps it, then highlighted/selected state changes.
I've implemented this and it works fine. Problems start
for example if user taps inside the button region,
does not release her/his finger, and moves mouse
outside the button area -- at this time my Button
would usually lose highlighted/selected state.
Anyway, I have solved this issue too, by overriding UIControlEventTouchUpOutside
and making button keep the state it had before...
But now another problem comes in, similar to the above,
if a user taps the button, does not release his/her
finger, and moves the finger to the right say (horizontally,
which also makes my dialog for instance go to the right),
then I again lose "selected/highlighted" state....
I believe again some kind of gesture similar to - but different -
than UIControlEventTouchUpOutside is being called which
removes my selected state...
Do you know what can be going in here? Any advice appreciated.
ps. I have fixed all the issues by just setting different images
for normal/selected states using the interface builder.
For the highlighted effect you can use the: setHighlighted of UIButton class.
When you start touching the button set the highlighted property of button to YES.
when you start touch:
yourButton.highlighted = YES;
When you stop touch:
yourButton.highlighted = NO;
I have fixed all the issues by just setting different images for normal/selected states using the interface builder.

UIScrollView - how to get rid of delay before scrolling?

I'm using a UIScrollView to display a custom UIView. When the user drags a finger across the UIScrollView, there is a noticeable delay before the display begins updating. If the user keeps touching the screen, the UIScrollView becomes very responsive after a short time. Subsequent attempts to scroll result in the same initial delay, followed by high responsiveness. This delay seriously affects the usability of the view and I would like to get rid of it.
In a test project I have written to try to get to the bottom of this issue, I have only been able to partially replicate the behaviour. The first time that the user scrolls is exactly the same - however any subsequent attempts to scroll are responsive straight away.
I have tried both setting delaysContentTouches = NO and subclassing UIScrollView so that touchesShouldBegin returns NO as suggested in multiple places online, but neither has worked.
I'm using MonoTouch on iOS 4.3, but Objective-C answers are fine. I would post code to help illustrate the issue, but since I have been unable to narrow down the problem this would be well over 1000 lines. Hopefully this is enough info to get a solution.
Does anyone know what might be causing this delay, and how I can get rid of it?
Some general suggestions for improving scrolling performance.
Have your scrolling views rasterize offscreen:
myView.layer.shouldRasterize = YES;
Set that property for each sub-view on the scrollview - do not set it for the children of those sub-views or you just eat up memory that way.
If your scrolling views do not need compositing, make sure you turn that blending off:
myView.opaque = YES;
Test using the simulator by leveraging these two features that appear on the Debug menu of the iOS Simulator:
Color Off-screen Rendered
Color Blended Layers
If that doesn't address your problem, and you have implemented UIScrollViewDelegate, double-check to make sure you are not doing anything time consuming in those methods - for example, based on your description, you might be doing something in scrollViewDidScroll, scrollViewWillBeginDragging, or scrollViewWillBeginZooming and if you are, optimize that so it happens before scrolling even begins. Also, make sure you're not doing anything in touchesBegan.
I suspect what is happening is there is some kind of interaction enabled in the content of your scroll view.
The system does not know if the initial touch down is going to be a tap on one of the subviews or a drag on the scroll view, therefore is causing a delay while it waits to see if you are going to lift your finger.
What are the subviews of the UIScroll view?
As an experiment set all the subviews of the UIScrollView to have userInteractionEnabled = NO, this will not be what you want, but its just a test. Is should scroll fine after this, otherwise I am wrong.

Best way to allow text edit completion on a complex iPhone UI

I have a somewhat complex iOS view hierarchy. One piece of text is an editable UITextField. When the user touches it, it becomes first responder, and is editable.
Here's the rub, though: Best practice should be that a touch anywhere outside the edit control causes it to resign first responder and end editing. What's the best way of accomplishing this?
Techniques I've tried:
Use the exclusiveTouch property, which stops the user from interacting with other controls, but doesn't cause editing to end. Also disallows user from interacting with my toolbar "Done" button.
Put a see-through UIView under the text field control and on top of everything else (except the toolbar), and use touches there to end editing. This works, but I end up reparenting the text field onto this other random view which sits above my whole hierarchy, which means I have to take care of the text field's layout in multiple places, since it no longer lives in the place where it lived originally, and I have to delegate all its behavior back and forth from its "shield" view to its native home container, which has all the related logic.
Is there an elegant solution to this problem that I'm missing? I figure it must be a common design issue.
Thanks.
Tile 4 "see-thru" views around the textview to capture/ignore touches. Doesn't require modifying or "lifting" the textview, and can be added to the parent view in a fairly modular way.
You can't mask a region without knowing what that mask will cover and what the mask will not cover. So any solution will require enough reach to gather both of those bounds. Either pass the text rect up, or the view rect/region to be disabled down, or both to something in-between. The controller for the stuff to be covered seems as good a place as any to consolidate both rects or regions, if not the controller for the text view.
The nub of the issue is what constitutes "best practice". The fact that the keyboard remains unless the user dismisses it is deliberate. For example, many apps need the user to be able to tap a button while still working in a text field.
The keyboard has a Return button. "Best practice" is to respond to the user tapping that button by resigning first responder. Otherwise, you should leave the keyboard there, since that's what the user expects.
However, if you insist on doing it your way, there's a simple solution: put a UITapGestureRecognizer on the background view. Its handler will be triggered if the user taps on the background or on any button or similar in the interface. So, presuming you have kept a record of what the first responder is, you can send resignFirstResponder to the first responder in the tap gesture recognizer's handler.
If you change your base view to a UIControl you can add an IBAction to that layer that resigns your text field as first responder.
Also, if you have multiple touch events, make sure they each becomeFirstResponder when touched.
I'd love to have some more details to qualify my explanations xD

UIScrollView with embedded UIWebView not scrolling after holding

I have a UIWebView which is embedded in a UIScrollView. The webView is resized so that the scroll view manages all the scrolling (I need control over the scrolling).
In the webView I have disabled userSelection via '-webkit-user-select: none;'
Everything is working fine except one annoying detail. When I hold down my finger on the content before starting to scroll for about a second the scrollView won't scroll. My best guess is, that it has something to do with userSelection. The time is about the same it usually takes for the copy/paste/magnifying-thing to appear which usually disables scrolling as well.
I am running out of ideas on how to solve this. Every help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
EDIT: Another aspect of the problem is, that the non-scrolling actually triggers JS-Eventhandler (click, mousedown, mouseup) inside my webView which leads to surprising app behavior. The user puts her finger down, waits, scrolls, nothing happens, removes her finger and this is perceived as a click, which feels wrong from a users perspective.
I would guess what is happening is that after that short duration, the scrollview is no longer interpreting the touch as being on it's view and instead passes the touch down to it's content views.
Have you tried delaying the content touches for the scrollview? This will essentially tell the scrollview to delay taking action on the touch event and instead to briefly monitor the touch and if the touch moves then it recognizes it as a swipe gesture for scrolling. If it doesn't move, it will eventually pass the touch along to it's subviews.
scrollView.delaysContentTouches = YES;
I think even then, there is a standard delay time before the scrollview will pass the touch events along the responder chain. If you hold for too long, it's going to naturally perceive it as being a press down event rather than a scroll event.
This question is not relevant anymore. As of iOS 5.0 the UIWebView is based on a real UIScrollView and also exposes that UIScrollView via a property. Use that instead.
And don't mess with UIWebViews embedded in UIScrollViews anymore. The documentation explicitly advises against that.
Relevant Documentation

Drag & sweep with Cocoa on iPhone

I'm about to start a new iPhone app that requires a certain functionality but I'm not sure if it's doable. I'm willing to research but first I just wanted to know if I should at least consider it or not.
I haven't seen this in an app before (which is my main concern, even though I haven't seen too many apps since I don't own an iPhone), but an example would be the iPhone shortcuts panels: you can hold on an app, and then drag it to another panel, sweeping while still dragging it. But this is the core app, is it possible to reproduce something similar within a normal app?
I only need to be sure it can be done before I start digging, I don't need code examples or anything, but if you have some exact resources that you consider helpful, that would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Yes. If you have your custom UIView subclass instance inside a UIScrollView, your view controller just needs to set the UIScrollView to delay content touches and not allow it to cancel touch events.
[scrollView setCanCancelContentTouches:NO];
[scrollView setDelaysContentTouches:YES];
When the user taps and holds in the custom view, the event goes to that custom view, which can process the touch events to drag an item around, but if the user quickly swipes, it scrolls the view.
The "panel" view that you're referring to appears to be a UIPageControl view — although, perhaps, the specific incarnation of this view that Apple uses for the iPhone's home page may be customized.
Instances of generic UIView views that you might touch-and-drag will receive touch events. By overriding methods in the view, these events can be processed and passed to the page control, in order to tell it to "sweep" between pages.
If I wanted to do what you're asking about, that's how I might approach it. It seems doable to me, in any case.
Start with this: Swip from one view to the next view
Try using a UIButton that tracks the time since the state of the button changed to "highlighted". You may need to do this in order to track the dragging and move the button around:
Observing pinch multi-touch gestures in a UITableView
Check to see if the button starts overlapping one side of the screen while being dragged. If s certain amount of time elapses since the button first started overlapping the edge and then manipulate the UIScrollView so that it switches to the next page on the corresponding side of the screen
You may need to use NSTimer to keep track of how long the button is held down, etc.
In any case there's no reason why this couldn't work.
If UIButton doesn't work then perhaps try a custom subclass of UIControl (which tracks the same touch down actions etc.). If that doesn't work then use the window event intercept thing to track everything.