In some news applications when it loads it shows a list of articles. When we click on an article, it goes to its detailed page. In the detailed page 1st there will be only the text related to the article. But suddenly an image comes(related to the article) on the top left corner and the text re-aligns itself to contain the image.
Wht are they doing here? Are they still using UILabel? If i am just adding a UIImageView inside a UILabel, the text will be be adjusted even before the image appears.How can I replicate this myself?
I might be wrong, but i think what they are doing probably similar to the following steps:
User clicks on Article
Article description is being loaded, async download of image is being initiated
once the article description is downloaded the detailsview gets added on top of the navigationstack and appears.
user reads the text....
at some point the download of the image finishes, the viewcontroller gets notified in some way and does a re-layout of the detailsview.
the re-layouting (or however you want to call it) will do two things (probably in an animated fashion)
As I'm not aware how to wrap text around images within a UILabel (keen to get ahold of that knowlegde tough) I would suggest, that what they do is simply creating a second label with the Imageview in place and then fading the first one (text only) out while fading the second one (containing text and image) at the same time..
not sure if this helps you, but I hope so.
cheers
TGiF sam
Use UIWebView, the readjustment you are talking about is html basic property, download your content in html format or make a html file programmatic once you download text and image and show them in UIWebView.
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I'm trying to load in content from a database and allow the user to flip through it like pages, then at the end of the content, give them options to go to another section of content (probably with buttons). The content is currently just formatted with html, but how do I implement the buttons to navigate? I'm a little new to Xcode so maybe I'm not even looking in the right direction.
refer a this opensource: https://github.com/devindoty/iBooks-Flip-Animation
this is very little code and perfectly works.
I have some text that I need to load from an XML file. The idea is to be able to make the text interactive. I should be able to tell when a user taps a piece of the text, like in the WordWeb app. I know this seems to be the kind of job that a UIWebView is for but I want to avoid generating HTML and implementing handlers for the hrefs. I hope that made any sense.
Another way could be using a UITableView with UITextViews or UILabels as content views for the cells. However, I couldn't find out how we can customize the appearance of the table view, add a border to the view for example.
The end result expected is a view that looks like a page from a book but pieces of the displayed text can be tapped and bookmarked etc.
Am I even thinking in the right direction?
I have a problem. Part of my app requires text to be shown in a table. The text needs to be selectable/copyable (but not editable) and any URLs within the text need to be highlighted and and when tapped allow me to take that URL and open my embedded browser.
I have seen a couple of solutions that solve one of either of these problems, but not both.
Solution 1: Icon Factory's IFTweetLabel
The first solution I tried was to use the IFTweetLabel class made possible by Icon Factory and used in Twitterrific.
While this solution allows for links (or anything you can find with a regex) to be detected to be handled on a case by case basis, it doesn't allow for selecting and copying.
There is also an issue where if a URL is long enough to be wrapped, the button that the class overlays above the URL to make it interactive cannot wrap and draws off screen, looking very odd.
Solution 2: Use IFTweetLabel and handle copy manually
The second thing I tried was to keep IFTweetLabel in place to handle the links, but to implement the copying using a long-tap gesture, like how the SMS app handles it. This was just about working, but it doesn't allow for arbitrary selection of text, the whole text is copied, or none is copied at all... Pretty black and white.
Solution 3: UITextView
My third attempt was to add a UITextView as a subview of the table cell.
The only thing that this doesn't solve is the fact that detected URLs cannot be handled by me. The text view uses UIApplication's openURL: method which quits my app and launched Safari.
Also, as the table view can get quite large, the number of UITextViews added as subviews cause a noticeable performance drag on scrolling throughout the table, especially on iPhone 3G era devices (because of the creation, layout, compositing whenever a cell is scrolled on screen, etc).
So my question to all you knowledgeable folk out there is: What can I do?
Would a UIWebView be the best option? Aside from a performance drag, I think a webview would solve all the above issues, and if I remember correctly, back in the 2.0 days, the Apple documentation actually recommended web views where text formatting / hyperlinks were required.
Can anyone think of a way to achieve this without a performance drag?
Many thanks in advance to everyone who can help.
As soon as I hit the submit button, a new idea hit me.
I was so preoccupied with having URLs inline with text and interactive that I didn't consider that maybe it's not the best solution.
I'm certain that to achieve that kind of behaviour, a UIWebView is the best choice, regardless of the performance issues.
However, maybe a better user experience / interaction is to not highlight the URLs inline, but to gather them into an array behind the scenes, and present a disclosure button as the cell's accessory view?
Then for selection and copying text, I could just use the UITextView with data detectors turned off and not worry about the links being sent off to safari and closing my app.
When the disclosure button is tapped, the user could be whisked off to the URL found in the text, or if more than one URL is found, present the user with a picker view to choose which to go to.
Any thoughts/criticisms of this idea are welcome.
You can prevent a textfield from being edited by overriding the UITextField Delegate methods such that they do not apply any edits. That leaves the field selectable and copyable but prevents alteration.
A better question to ask is: do you actually have to display the actual URL itself? Can you get away with just a page/location name, just the server.host.domain prefix or some other condensed representation of the url? I don't think anyone whats to try to read a long url on a mobile's restricted screen.
If you do need to display the entire url then I think that a detail view is the way to go.
We are trying to write a training manual application for the iPhone. On the top half of the screen is a diagram of a car engine, on the bottom half is some text. At the user repeatedly hits a "next" button, we highlight different parts of the engine, and in concert we highlight different parts of the descriptive text below.
We basically want "living text" in the text half, with the illustration following along on top to where the reader is in the text. What we'd like from the text is 1. user can scroll it using their thumb so possibly a UIScrollView 2. the software can explicitly drive a scroll to any part of the text (when they hit the "next" button). 3. the words in the text are interspersed with hotlinks e.g. "this is the camshaft... this is the piston..." and the user should be able to click on any of the keywords like camshaft, piston, and have the diagram highlight that. (The problem is not highlighting the diagram, its capturing the click). The text would have 300~400 buttons/links/keywords and about 600 words of text.
Since this is fairly similar to using a web browser, we tried using Apple's version of webkit using a UIWebView and handleOpenURL to register a service back to the app itself. But Webkit for internal links a popup comes up asking permission to access that link. Every single the user wants to go to a link (in our case just an internal event that we'd intercept so that we can highlight e.g. the camshaft). Tried to intercept the event from the HTML view, but that didn't work.
It seems like the best we can do is to abandon scrolling text, and make the text part more like flash cards or a power point presentation, breaking the text into custom UIViewCells with buttons inside a UIScrollView. However, this would impose an annoying constraint on the author that they would have to write everything to fit in the UIViewCells, sort of chunky.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
This is definitely something you can use a UIWebView for. Don't use handleOpenURL, rather, set your viewController as the webview's delegate, and override -webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:. When this gets called, check the request, and pull out your link data from there.
It would probably be easier to implement that completely in JavaScript in the document you load in a UIWebView. You would have to use JavaScript (i.e. [UIWebView stringbyevaluatingjavascriptfromstring:]) anyway to achieve things like scrolling to a certain position.
I'm working through the Stanford iPhone programming course online. The Presence app assignment pulls Twitter and displays each one in a separate UITableViewCell.
Updates often include URL's and I'd like to know how to display just the URL text in blue, having it be tappable. I can parse the text for URL's with no problem, just no idea how to display the URL itself.
Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
As said above a button would work, but in terms of the UI it would probably look more natural if you had a label.
Alternatively, you could fill the UITableViewCell with a UIWebView. The UIWebView would hold all the text and you should easily be able to set part of the text as a link (color blue) using html.
You'll have to add a UIButton (or something similar) to the cell, with the button title being the URL and the action opening the actual link.