Looking for some catalog/gallery(not UICatalog, just images), where I can see preview of each UI element in iPhone SDK, along with corresponding class name(eg datetime picker, calendar, the black switch bar on bottom). This will give me rough idea on which UI elements I can use in my app and go read about corresponding class.
I would highly recommend reading the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines Document. It's produced by Apple, and has a ton of great advice on how to craft interfaces as well as descriptions and guides for the standard UI elements.
You can also check out the UIKit Framework Reference, and the wiki at CocoaDev. If you need images, teehan+lax have a great PSD template for mockups
Related
I would like to implement rich format text views as are demonstrated in Instagram. Following is a screenshot.
Specifically, my goals are:
Words at different positions of the same text view may have different font sizes, font colors and font styles(bold, italic, etc).
Touch events (long press, touch down, etc) can be detected in the delegate callbacks. Information (which word is touched, whether it's a long press or a touch down, etc) can be gathered in such callback methods.
Big frameworks like Three20 are out of the question. Small, independent libraries are highly preferred. Low level Cocoa Touch APIs may also be OK if it won't take me more than a few days to wrap them up.
Any suggestions are highly appreciated.
NSAttributedString lets you do this. If you have access to the iOS 5 developers cookbook by Erica Sadun there is a recipe for a wrapper around NSMutableAttributedString which makes it simple to add text piece by piece, changing attributes as you go.
Here is the source on Erica's githuib
Finally found an ideal open source solution (supports both iOS 5.0 and iOS 6): the OHAttributedLabel, which is capable of both rich format and touch handling.
https://github.com/AliSoftware/OHAttributedLabel
I was asked by a client to make a "skinnable" app and I don't really know what that means.
I googled like crazy and I didn't found a clear answer or an example.
If anyone has a clue about this, any tip would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Generally this means the app will allow the user to choose different looks for the UI, each of which will have a different color scheme, feel, etc.
What I actually did with my project. I decided to use multiple storyboards to give me greater control over the entire UI and UX of each theme. I programmatically link them all together via a master storyboard that links them all together. That's what I did, and it works very very well. Performance is great, while still maintaining high level of fine grain control over each theme. You can even keep your Header and Implementation files the same for individual view controllers, just so as you keep the names the same on the storyboard.
So for instance, one of my apps that I'm working on called Jam-mout (A music player) has multiple high quality themes. (Image attached). Each theme has it's own storyboard.
For iPhone apps, where the majority of the GUI design is provided by the operating system, you could do it by setting custom Navigation bar background images, custom button graphics, and different fonts/sizes/weights and whitespace. Make sure you're working with a designer who's familiar with the iPhone GUI (if you're not working closely with a designer this is going to be a nightmare).
I recently put together an app for a client who wanted a heavily customised GUI: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gogoparis/id428497937?mt=8. A 'skinnable' app would have several sets like this, so the user could choose between several different overall styles. (I hope your client has an enormous design budget!)
my post here should help you get started:
What is the recommended method of styling an iOS app?
if you need live theme changes, each theme in this example could post notifications when the user selects another theme (or skin) - then you can update either the theme instance itself.
alternatively, you can create identifiers for themes which are mapped (NSCFDictionary) to a central theme factory. an example identifier for a specific view for use with the theme factory could be a string MONImageSelectorTableCellThemeIdentifier.
an example manager/factory which handles all theme loading and vends references to themes:
#interface MONThemeManager : NSObject
//...
- (MONTheme *)themeForCurrentlySelectedSkinForViewWithIdentifier:(NSString *)identifier;
//...
#end
beyond that, it's hard to answer your question in more detail without knowing your requirements. the implementation of skinning an app can range from very simple to very very complex. good luck.
Already some good answer here, but I'd add that if you use a ui toolkit such as Three20
you can skin everything using CSS as you might for web pages.
I do realise this is an old post, but I thought I'd share my penny on the matter:)
To make any Cocoa app skinnable you need you think of 3 aspects of the app:
1) Uniformity: By this I mean that on all windows, views (including buttons, text inputs etc...) you want to have a 'standard' that will apply throughout the app. This is the first thing you need to look at. Although iOS and OS X alike already have 'themes' as to put it i.e. Apples default way of shading and laying things out, you can override these (refer to the individual view / window etc... documentation.
2) Performance: With skinning etc... performance is always an issue when it comes to writing your own drawRect etc... methods. The code apple have in place for the 'default' is already optimised, so you need to keep a close eye on the performance of the app whilst you are doing this. Good examples are: Do I use an image with a gradient, or do I use NSGradient? Both of which have performance issues when it comes to rendering them, but it's a question of which is the better of the two
3) userDefaults: This is generally the area where you'd be getting your 'skin settings' pulled from. userDefaults is basically where you store all of the information which you generally set in a preference pane.
If I were you I'd look into the class reference of it:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSUserDefaults_Class/
Furthermore, here's a nifty example of using userDefaults:
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/nsuserdefaults_iphone-sdk/
Hope this helps!
Is there any web-resource (gallery perhaps) showing all user interface elements made from UIView(or other?), so it will give me some quick idea what controls exist, what do they look like?
It's not a web resource per se (depending on what you mean), but you can get the source code for the UICatalog sample from Apple and see what is offered. It's also a good project to look at in case you want to go beyond the look and and actually see how it's implemented.
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but here's a PSD file containing all the iPhone UI elements.
if you use Omnigraffle, there is an iPhone stencil. http://graffletopia.com/stencils/392
I simply want to link a label to a slider in order for it to display the current value of that slider. This is my first time working with Objective-C, and the problem seems far more complicated than in Java or C#.
This is the first thing you will see demonstrated in the Stanford CS193P videos on iTunes - if you want to do it in Interface Builder look no further.
For some reason, I can't seem to locate the documentation for the above support within the foundation. I am talking about the view used by some applications to show a collection of images in a cool 3D view where you can flip through the set, much like the iPod application view of the albums.
You're looking for Cover Flow. I believe it is an unpublished API. However Open Flow is a viable replacement.
OK, found it, it's called CoverFlow - but I also note that it appears that Apple considers this a private API and thus cannot be used for apps on the App Store - can anyone confirm that it is so?