webOS style view switching on iPhone app - iphone

I have been working with a iPhone app that I would like to have switch views like the Palm Pre does for multitasking. I know the usual way of switching views by using the black bar at the bottom of the app but the app I am working on does not lend itself to having a big black bar in the way (see attached picture #1).
I guess my question is, how do I shrink the current view (Current Location window) and show other views on the sides? (see attached picture #2) Then be able to swipe left and right to view other views. I have no idea how to do this and would be eternally grateful if someone could help me out with this.
http://www.threepixeldrift.com/images/deep-storage/webOScardapp1.jpg
http://www.threepixeldrift.com/images/deep-storage/webOScardapp2.jpg

The architecture should be similar to that of NavigationController: you have a number of ViewControllers each responsible for one card in your app. Then you have a 'super-controller' which controls these ViewControllers, by adding and removing their controlled views from the superview when necessary.
You'll need to use CoreAnimation and write the animations yourself.

i would use a UIScrollView and each card can be a small view that is shown by setting the contentoff set.

Related

UIButton images look fine in IB but get stretched when displayed on app

I'm developing an Enterprise app for tracking mileage and maintenance for company vehicles. I've added graphic buttons to snazz it up a bit. The buttons look the way they're supposed to look on the XIB in IB, and on the iPhone all other UIViews look correct, but on one particular UIView the graphic images are stretched way out of proportion vertically.
The first image below shows how it's supposed to look, with the three graphics buttons at the bottom. The second image shows how it's showing on the phone. The Help button on this screen cap shows normally, but it can't be counted on to stay that way.
It also is not consistent. Calling this view at any time may show the image stretched or it may not show an image at all. It rarely shows the image normally, like the Help button looks below.
The development phone is a 4S running 6.1.3. The views are set for the Retina 3.5 screen. XCode is the latest (whatever it is).
Again, it's only on this one view that the problem shows up. There is another UIView on the same view controller that is hidden when this UIView is shown. The button graphics on the other view look fine. All of the other views and view controllers use the same graphics on the UIButton, without any problem.
In Interface Builder (Xcode) you created the view using a 4.5-inch screen height.
But the device where you are seeing the problem is a 5-inch screen. So the view is resized to fit.
And when it does that, the autolayout constraints that Interface Builder put on those subviews take over to determine what they do. Those constraints are causing the heights to change.
No need to turn Autolayout off. Autolayout can be very useful, but it seems to enjoy randomly assigning the constraint "Align Baseline to:" to UIButtons after repositioning them.
Just select the UIButton/UIImageView in question inside Storyboard, locate the constraint "Align Baseline to:", tap the gear icon and select "Promote to User Constraint", and tap once more and select "Delete". This should solve your issue.
In response to the comments here, I will answer my own question: I turned Autolayout off for this view controller, and that fixed everything. This is the first app I have written since XCode has begun development for the iPhone 5, so I wasn't aware of the Autolayout feature. I'll need to understand how it works and why it did what it did.
Thanks for all your help!

Whats the approach to create a view similar to the one at apple app store

I wanted to know how can we design the view controller such that.., the upper half of the screen remains fixed and the below part of the screen can be navigated through.. !!
Should we use slipScreenController here ?
Your description sounds nothing like the Appstore app but the Appstore app simply has one vertical UIScrollView and another horizontal UIScrollView inside that for images.
If you are referring to browsing categories in AppStore then:
That is a tableView implemented in such way that it doesn't take the whole screen area. You need to create a UIViewController (not UITableViewController) and than add a tableView to the view (using Interface Builder or code). That way you can change the size and position of the tableView and use the remaining area of the view for something else, for example a UISegmentedControl above the tableView.
If you are reffering to reading description and images of single app then I think that UIScrollView is used for displaying images, not sure about the rest.

Can my custom tabbar be created like so for iPhone?

I have designed a custom tabbar and the developer says the design I created can't be done.
The screen is made up of a usual background with a tabbar. I'd like my tabbar to look a little different to the usual iPhone style. I would like at the bottom of the tabbar a grass illustration (transparent) and on top would sit all the separate buttons and on top of those would be the icons. All of these images (as seen in link below) are separate .png files.
When the user scrolls the content, it will scroll under the transparent grass. The buttons of course will be clickable and have a different view for an active state.
Please see the link below to see a mock-up of the image:
http://www.stuartkidd.com/dummy.jpg
I'd appreciate if the community could explain to me if this could be done and if so, how. I thought it would have something to do with 'creating a custom tabbar'.
And a further question, if it can be done, can also the tab buttons be horizontally
scrollable with a swipe action?
Thanks,
It all can be done but you are going against the Iphone UI guidelines. You won't be able to leverage the UITabbarView to do what you want so you'll basically have to write the whole thing from scratch. Your tab bar would be a scroll view with a row of buttons representing each tab. When a button is clicked you load in the appropriate view. The UITabBar controller gives you a lot of functionality for free and I suspect once you start working towards this you'll see exactly how much extra work this will end up costing you. Going against the way Apple does things can be a slippery slope.
Another idea might be to keep a hidden UITabBar to manage the tabs and call it from your custom tab bar. This would free you from a lot of the hassle of swapping views/controllers in and out.
You can create a row of custom buttons and have 2 subviews. One for the bottom navigation bar and one for the content view where you will be swapping your content based on what is pressed.
You can have a state which maintains what was clicked. Based on that you can set the button enabled state for every button in your bottom bar.
button.selected = YES
It will be easy to handle the touch up inside events and properly load appropriate views in and out of the bigger subview as they will be part of the same view controller.
I have implemented a similar functionality and it works well but still in process of submitting it to the app-store.

Special UIScrollView with multiple objects (3) on each page

What I want to accomplish is something like this:
Two different scrollViews, and each one scrolls horizontically. Each showing 3 images, and a half one (or 1/3th) piece of the next image in the datasource of the scrollview.
Does anyone know how to accomplish such a scrollview?
I also want to be able to tap an image to flip it and show some information and a button to the detail. (See lower scrollview).
Tapping it again would just show back the image, much like the coverflow ui inside itunes, but without the coverflow being 3D...
Any help is welcome :)
Thanks in advance,
Lewion
Scroll view doesn't have a datasource. What you are looking for is standard scrolling and nothing special.. So it is definitely doable... Check the scrolling and photo scroller sample codes from apple developer samples. For more implementations of scroll view check the scroll view suite sample code and read the scroll view programming guide.
The flip animation is also a standard animation for a view and is easily doable. For example, create a utility application for iphone. It has a flip side view. See how that animation is done.

displaying a smaller UIWebView as a form sheet

I'm trying to pop up a UIWebView on iPad with a web site that is specifically sized for the iPhone (320x480). I want the web view to be centered, and transition in using a zooming animation. Other apps have this functionality, but I can't seem to find out how to do it. I've tried various combinations of presentation & transition style, but no matter what I do, the web view takes up the entire screen and slides vertically to cover the screen. I've made the web view 320x480 in IB, and am using UIModalPresentationStyleFormSheet, which should make it at least slide up into the center of the screen using a small window, but that is not occurring.
anyone know what's wrong?
Are you setting the property of the parent UIViewController or the modal UIViewController? Because you should be setting the properties of the modal UIViewController before presenting the controller instead of the parent.
This might be no help at all because you're doing the right thing, but it was the first error I made when starting to use MVCs.
maybe any of the autosize property is set. just do one thing bind your webview with the code and through code try to set the frame. Hope it will work as it worked many times to me when i faced similar types of problem.
hAPPY cODING...