I am looking for how to style a label in a UITableView cell, so that it shows how many children/messages are in the next view controller.
This is used in Apple's Mail app, to show how many messages are in the inbox or account.
I am sure that this is a UILabel, but what font, color and how to make the oval around it?
The font is surely bold Helvetica because that's what Apple uses everywhere in the iPhone UI. To get the exact color, you could take a screenshot and then sample the color with a color picker. For the rounded corners, experiment with a rather large label.layer.cornerRadius.
Instead of using UILabel.layer.cornerRadius, which results in terrible scrolling performance (as mentioned in my comment), subclass UILabel with a custom drawRect.
Here is the version that I use: http://gist.github.com/500793
Related
How would you go about creating a rolling breaking news view, as you can see in apples notification center on the iphone (Where the stock is shown)?
Is there any open source examples of this?
Thanks in advance
`https://github.com/cbpowell/MarqueeLabel`
MarqueeLabel is a functional equivalent to UILabel that adds a scrolling marquee effect when the text of the label outgrows the available width (for the given font size). All standard UILabel properties are available in MarqueeLabel and it behaves just like a UILabel.
I am having a terrible time trying to get an input box like the one in the SMS app.
Can anyone offer some guidance on how to build one of these and make it look good? I need an input box that is shaped nicely like the UITextfield but will stretch vertically when typing.
I assume that I need to calculate width of the text and stretch the overlay image frame vertically when the text word wraps. The closest I have come does stretch but the cursor bounces all around when nearing the boundaries.
UPDATE:
I have worked on this everyday for a week and I have about given up on the UITextView. I can get it to stretch properly but when backspacing, the Textview height shrinks too much when going up a line. As I continue backspacing it corrects itself. For example, it displays this behavior when I am on line 4 and backspace up to line 3. Then as I continue backspacing, it corrects until I get to the end of line 2. Then it corrects itself,.... etc.
I decided to try to subclass UITextField but I can't even get it to display in the Frame size that I specify. 150,150,150,150.
Try Chat Input Sample. It has the similar look and functionality of SMS app.
Three20 project has a control that should do this for you.
From the Three20 README:
TTTextEditor is a UITextView which can
grow in height automatically as you
type. I use this for entering messages
in Facebook Chat, and it behaves
similarly to the editor in Apple's SMS
app.
You get to do this yourself. Luckily, the UITextField can notify you whenever its text changes using UITextFieldTextDidChangeNotification, and luckily NSString has methods (under the UIKit Additions) that let you get the height of the string given a certain width using boundingRectWithSize:options:attributes:context:, and luckily you can resize a UITextField yourself using frame.
I know this is old but for the people that still look at this answer there is now a nice control from Slack that does that called SlackTextViewController.
I am trying to work out (or find) a button that looks half decent for use in my app. In the image below I have two buttons at the bottom, the default button (interfaceBuilder) and one using two png images from the Apple UICatalog.
I am a little shocked that apple did not include something a little more stylish in IB. I assume that my only option is to find/use/make a suitable replacement button image. Before I fire up Photoshop does anyone know of any replacement buttons I might use?
gary
What you can do is use a segmented control with just one segment - you get the shading you want and it's not much harder to use than a standard button.
If you want to try out some button designs, you can draw them in Opacity, which includes a template for iPhone buttons. Opacity can output the button as a stretchable PNG for use in the button or as a UIView / UIButton subclass with all the Quartz drawing calls within it.
I recommend having a look into the Three20 library. It provides a TTButton class that can be customized using TTStyles, and its very easy to create your own styles. In the Three20 example app, there are a lot of styles available already, especially styles for navigation bar buttons. They serve as great examples.
I need a textfield so an user could write several lines. Unfortunately a UITextField does not provide several lines, so I think I have to use an UITextView.
But the design of both are not the same.
Is it possible to design the UITextView like the UITextfield standard with white background and rounded corners?
Thanks a lot in advance & Best Regards.
In my self appointed role as interface-nazi, I feel compelled to point out that UITextField and UITextView have different appearances to communicate to users to expect a slightly different function.
In a textfield, a return ends editing. In a textview, it may only create a new line. In a textfield, links and phone numbers are not recognized. In a textview they are. Textviews can scroll. And so on...
You shouldn't create a non-standard interface element unless you have a strong compelling reason to do so. You should ask yourself how making a textview look like a textfield will help the user understand what actions they need to take to make the app work as they expect and wish it to.
Surprisingly small tweaks can create serious user confusion. A non-standard interface can introduce just slight pause, a half second, every time they use it. That minor confusion can degrade their perception of the utility of the app.
You can put a mask image with rounded borders over your textView. Background of UITextView can be changed by standard setBackgroundColor message.
Thanks to Timur here, you can use this chat input sample to implement a multiple line uitextview like what you see in the iPhone messaging app.
It helped me in my app :)
Here how it looks:
I am trying to add badges to the icons in my app. e.g. in the facebook app, in the home page the number of pending requests is shown on the requests icon.
Can someone provide any links/ideas on how to do this?
Thanks,
V
I know this article is a little bit old, but it helps me recently to make a little class to create custom badges. I thought it would be fair to make this class public for everyone. So here it is CustomBadge.
best regard
- Sascha
Lots of ways to do this. You can overlay a UILabel over the icon (which may be a UIView or UIImageView). YOu can put another view on top of the icon, and draw the text right into that view. Or make your icon view be a subclass of UIView, and when you get called to draw, you draw the icon and the number.
Plus, you may want to play with blend modes, shadow, masking, etc., in order to create something that is visually attractive.
I'd probably start with reading more about Quartz, if you haven't already. The rest is just how you wire it all up.
And some other links:
http://scientificninja.com/development/numeric-badges-on-the-iphone
http://th30z.netsons.org/2009/03/qt4-drawing-notification-badges/
alt text http://th30z.netsons.org/wp-content/uploads/qtdrawbadges.png
The Three20 project (its code is part of the Facebook app) has those badges.