Creating fancy uiTableViews - iphone

I am looking to implement a "world High Scores" for a game I wrote. I have several games already installed on my phone and was wondering how developers are creating those fancy looking "High Score" table views?
I have seen some very cool ones...some showing the scores within a view that pops up from the bottom, showing half way and then having buttons across the top of the view to show Local, and Global scores. Orba is the game I am speaking about.
I guess what I am asking is: Are these just regular uiTableViews with different background images and if so, does this all have to be done via code and not via builder?
Any example links would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Geo...

George,
I would suggest this excellent article by Matt Gallagher: Easy custom UITableView drawing. He goes through great pains to show and explain many ways to customize UITableViews.
Without seeing a specific example, I hope this helps.

Related

Scrollable grid-like view

I'm writing an app with a view that has a grid of images (3x3) and it needs to have infinite scroll per row and per column with snap to position, very similar to the 'Design Museum Collection' app. How would I go about implementing this view? Is there a library that already supports this? I would like to implement this natively in IOS. Can I use UIScrollView or do I need to create this bidirectional scroll view from scratch. Here is a video of the 'Design Museum Collection' app (http://vimeo.com/39260302).
Thanks in advance!
It's been quite a while since your question but as I've been struggling with the same thing I'm gonna answer it for future reference...
Sadly I could not find a good solution anywhere so after a lot of hours of experimenting I came up with this: https://github.com/AlvinNutbeij/DWGridController
It's still a work in progress but very usable for your purpose I'd say!
See the tutorial How To Make An Interface With Horizontal Tables Like The Pulse News App. It will guide you through the basics.
you can check this out: AQGridView.

Switching to Different plists by Swiping?

This is going to be a bit difficult to explain. I'm usually fine with code on the micro level, but need some guidance on the macro end. Anything would help.
I'm trying to basically create a notecard application, where the user is presented with a screen with a stack of flashcards. There are multiple subjects, each managed by a different .plist. To switch between subject areas, you swipe left and right. I don't know how to most efficiently achieve this using storyboards, which is my primary issue. Could you do this using one view, or do I have to create a different view for every stack of flashcards and create a transition between them?
Thank you very much, in advance.
If you are looking to switch between different views by either swiping left of right, the most logical choice would be to use a UIScrollView with paging enabled. You could then initialize an NSArray and have it store the names of your different PList files and use it to manage your data between views. Obviously this is just one of many solutions to this problems, but when you talk about wanting a swiping action to switch, UIScrollViews would be the iOS default way of doing it.
Here is a tutorial on how to use UIScrollViews with paging:
http://www.iosdevnotes.com/2011/03/uiscrollview-paging/
Hope that helps!

What is a good way to implement a menu system for an iphone game?

I'm working on a project and I've been asked to add a fairly detailed and nested menu system overtop pre-existing gameplay. I'm new to iphone programming in general, but have experience with other C languages on different platforms. I'm looking for an example of a good clean menu system architecture.
So far, I've gotten a little used to how the xib files interact with the code, but I still have a ways to go it seems. I have two UIViewControllers; lets call them UIViewControllerA and UIViewControllerB. I started with UIViewControllerA (the game's main view controller) and want to add UIViewControllerB as a menu to lay on top the game window. The only way I've found to get UIViewControllerB to render is to use it as a data member of UIViewControllerA and add it as a subview to UIViewControllerA.
This seems like a very unclean way to organize this system and introduces some bugs. IE - when I have UIViewControllerB showing, the touch events fall through to UIViewControllerA which I do not want.
Sorry this is long, but I'll get to the point. Does anyone have a good suggestion on how to create a clean and robust menu system? I feel as though I am way off the mark. I don't think I have enough experience to come up with a good system on this platform.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT:
I feel as perhaps I didn't specify that I'm seeking help for technical programming design rather than visual design. I'm seeking for a way to implement a state-machine type architecture for an iphone platform.
Check out this link - https://github.com/relikd/OGActionChooser
It's a nice-looking replacement for a UIActionSheet or UIAlertView - this could easily be customized to present a modal menu system.
A really easy way to have a clean menu page, simply take a picture of hardwood floor (or off the web) and add buttons. I would show an example but I need 10 points...
Take the pic, onto PS (photoshop) and add a box or square, add shadow and some cool special effects, upload it to xcode, but the buttons in the box.

Objective-C: Custom UI elements

I am a noob just getting started with Obj-C and iPhone development. I've been going through many examples and tutorials for the past 2 weeks and making good progress learning how to use the CoreLocation, CoreGraphics, MapKit, UI, etc. Very basic and straight-forward. There are many tutorials out there on these subjects.
However, now with that functionality in the bag, I am starting on putting my our project together. Our UI designer has created custom views of many iPhone controls like the UIToolbar, UIActionsheet, etc. Like having custom images for backgrounds and buttons. I cannot find any solid tutorials or advice on how to go about customizing things like the tab bar. For example, some say to create a Category overriding the drawRect method. Others say to subclass the UIToolbar class, but this say this is not recommended and may get appStore rejected. At this point I am confused and frustrated at which direction to start. Can someone with experienced with UI customization and app store approval please give me some direction or point me to some good tutorials? Thank you.
I would suggest that you can customise what Apple allow you to easily do with the available APIs and follow Apple's advice to not override drawrect. Oh and watch some of this years ADC videos.
Of course the coming ios5 will greatly increase your uikit customisation possibilities for ios5 devices.

Text Editor like Pages iPad App

I want to implement a functionality similar to found in Pages app..i.e. text floating around images, image zooming etc.. I have been struggling with this part of my application but no success yet. Would be grateful if someone provides me with some pointers in this regard , like 'Which UIControl should I use?','Help in thinking logic' etc..
Thanx in advance.
Sounds like a fun app to develop.
Some Pointers:
Immediately off the bat, I would say look into creating your own Controls for the floating objects.
I would suggest tackling a smaller project, or maybe a few small to medium size projects. p
Try making a few apps with WinForms or WPF. Also look into XSL:FO.
Immediately off the bat, I would say look into creating your own Controls.
There was a WWDC session that talked about iOS text. I don't think it's violating NDA to say this is going to be a very hard project. No, make that very, very, very hard.
You will probably need to do all UI yourself, and use Core Text for rendering of the text. (But I believe you need to draw selection, etc.) And do the layout yourself.