I've made a ViewBased app, in the app delegate i've set a UITabBarCotntroller, in the app i have different view Controller two of them displays text in a UITextView and labels, the other one is my "ShakeController" a UIViewController in which i've set a UIAcelerometerDelegate, in it i create a instance of UIAccelerometer, in the method which manages the shake everything works fine, in this controller i have also set a UIImageView to make a simple animation, in the view Did Load method i set my imageView.animation to an array of UIImage.
My problem is : when the app is launched i use the ViewControllers and everything work fine, but when i tap the ShakeController item in the tab bar and then when i come back to the other controllers the label looks like : label and textView like : Lorem ipsum..... the text of UItextView in IB.
I have noticed thaht if i comment the initialisation of my imageView to the array of image i can navigate the items (from a view controller to another) without the label change and stay what i want them to be.
Notice that the two controllers are in a UINavigationController.
(i use #proprety (nonnatomic, retain) then #synthesize ... then releqse in the dealloc for the labels textview and my uiimageView)
Do not know what to do thanks to all
Quite hard to understand what you're asking here... I re-read it three times and I'm still not sure!
Since you find the problem (the data in the other view being "released") goes away when you comment out your imageView animation initialisation, I would conclude that you are using up a large amount of the iPhone's memory which means that it is automatically unloading any un-seen view controllers. It will do this quite quickly to preserve memory.
You don't say how many images are in your animation, but just 10 medium-large images can be enough to trigger memory issues; if you are wanting to use 20/30+ you have to look for another way.
You can try just loading a few frames into your image first and then swapping them out on a recurring timer. But if it's anything more than very basic animation you'll need to get stuck in to core animation instead: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreAnimation_guide/Articles/WhatisCoreAnimation.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004689
Related
I have a UIView which is essentially doing two things. The first mode lets the user control things that they've inputted. The second mode lets them input new values to interact with.
To switch between modes it animates the alpha of most of the components of the view to 0.0 and the new ones to 1.0 and it looks really nice. So far the only downside is that my nib in IB is kind of messy for editing.
I was just wondering if this was the best practice for doing this type of thing or if I should be loading a new view. The components are all just UIKit objects like buttons, sliders, labels, etc.
I would recommend add a second View to your xib which holds the editing elements. Then create an IBOutlet for the second view so you can access it in your view controller. When you are ready to switch between, the code that does the alpha animation can also quickly add that editing view as a subview of your main view starting with a 0.0 alpha. Then your alpha animation will bring it into view. It will look the same to you, but it'll be easier to edit in IB. I set up a simple example and took a screenshot to show you what I mean.
As title says, I'm wondering if stacking subviews can slow down an iPhone application.
For example, I have a UIViewController, which has a view occupying the whole screen. When the user presses a button, I create a second view controller and add its view as a subview of the original VC, making the second view completely hide the first one.
Does the application have some kind of automatic optimization which would be something like "ok, I know what to draw for every pixel of the screen, I stop seeking for subviews" ?
If not, I don't think stacking 2 full-screen views can really slow down the app, but could 3, 4 or more views be problematic if they include many subviews themselves (labels, images)?
Read the View Controller Guide sections on Modal View Controllers and memory management. Prefer to use modal Views instead of subviews when you want to present a new screen temporarily and a UINavigationController for "drill-down" views.
You can always set UIView#hidden = YES on the views not seen. That should prevent redraws.
This is largely dependent of what the subviews contain and what is the total memory load of the app. Memory is very crucial for devices like iPhone and you should never keep the things which you don't require. When you are adding many subviews without releasing any, your memory requirement obviously will increase. This may slow down the app, even may crash the app. Stacking of two may not be a problem, but stacking many is not a very good design.
So the summary is you should always check the memory load of the app through instrument and always properly respond to memory warnings.
I'm writing a simple iPhone app which lets a user access a series of calculators. It consists of the following:
UITableViewController (RootViewController), with the list of calculators.
UIViewController + UIScrollView (UniversalScroller), which represents an empty scroll view - and has a 'displayedViewController' property.
UIViewController (Calculators 1-9), each of which contains a view with controls that represents a particular calculator. Each calculator takes 3-5 values via UITextFields and UISliders, and has a 'calculate' button. They can potentially be taller than 460px(iPhone screen height).
The idea is:
User taps on a particular menu item in the RootViewController. This loads and inits UniversalScroller, ALSO loads and inits the UIViewcontroller for the particular calculator that was selected, sets the displayedViewController property of UniversalScroller to the newly loaded calculator UIViewcontroller, and pushes the UniversalScroller to the front.
When the UniversalScroller hits its 'viewDidLoad' event, it sets its contentSize to the view frame size of its 'displayedViewController' object. It then adds the displayedViewController's view as a subview to itself, and sets its own title to equal that of the displayedViewController. It now displays the calculator, along with the correct title, in a scrollable form.
Conceptually (and currently; this stuff has all been implemented already), this works great - I can design the calculators how I see fit, as tall as they end up being, and they will automatically be accommodated and displayed in an appropriately configured UIScrollView. However, there is one problem:
The main reason I wanted to display things in a UIScrollView was so that, when the on-screen-keyboard appeared, I could shift the view up to focus on the control that is currently being edited. To do this, I need access to the UniversalScroller object that is holding the current calculator's view. On the beganEditing: event of each control, I intended to use the [UniversalScroller.view scrollRectToVisible: animated:] method to move focus to the correct control. However, I am having trouble accessing the UniversalScroller. I tried assigning a reference to it as a property of each calculator UIViewController, but did't seem to have much luck. I've read about using Delegates but have had trouble working out exactly how they work.
I'm looking for one of three things:
Some explanation of how I can access the methods of a UIScrollView from a UIViewController whose view is contained within it.
or
Confirmation of my suspicions that making users scroll on a data entry form is bad, and I should just abandon scrollviews altogether and move the view up and down to the relevant position when the keyboard appears, then back when it disappears.
or
Some pointers on how I could go about redesigning the calculators (which are basically simple data entry forms using labels, sliders and textfields) to be contained within UITableViewCells (presumably in a UITableView, which I understand is a scrollview deep down) - I read a post on SO saying that that's a more pleasing way to make a data entry form, but I couldn't find any examples of that online. Screenshots would be nice. Anything to make my app more usable and naturally 'iPhone-like', since shuffling labels and textboxes around makes me feel like I am building a winforms app!
I've only recently started with this platform and language, and despite being largely an Apple skeptic I definitely see the beauty in the way that it works. Help me solve this problem and I might fall in love completely.
Dan
If you have the particular calculator view, you should be able to get to the scroll view via the superview property (though there might be more than one intermediate view, so you might need the superview of the superview).
I have an iPhone app that displays a modal view controller. The modal view controller shows two instances of a custom subclass of UITextView called RoundedTextView, an MKMapView, and a UIToolbar. I construct the viewController only once, and reset its data and present it each time the user summons it.
When showing this view controller with presentModalViewController, I noticed that the animation to show the view was choppy on the 3G. So, to speed it up, I set the alpha of the MKMapView and the two RoundedTextView objects to 0 on viewWillDisappear and back to 1 on viewDidAppear. This made it nice and fast. I also presume that I could remove the views from the superview to speed it up as well.
Does anyone else jump through these kind of hoops on the iPhone. Is there something else I should be doing to avoid this hack?
It's not a hack to simplify drawing during animation in order to make the animation more smooth. It is indeed a very valid technique.
You may be able to achieve similar performance improvements by setting all UI elements to Opaque, a technique also used to fix table view cell performance issues. You just have to make sure background colors match.
The main problem I had was I subclassed UIButton to make gradient buttons and I had the boundary mask enabled. This made the performance terrible. I removed that option and made my buttons square and it's blazin now.
I am almost at the end of coding my kids educational application, woohoo!.
But... Im stuck on something.
When app loads i have my main view. It has 4 buttons for flipviews(each with ten views of content) and 4 buttons for character selection(an image that will follow you through every screen of content).
Problem is im unsure on how to link UIButton selection to UIImage display in multiple views. I want the user to choose a character button and then continue to the flipviews and in the views the image displayed should be the one that they have selected on the main view. So everytime they return to the main view they can change the character that will follow them around the app.
Any thoughts, help or code would be much appreciated!
Thank You
Alex
Make a new object, a subclass of UIImageView, which has a -setImage method. Once you set the image, then where ever you embed that object, it will display the same image. You could even have that subclass view have a score displayed next to it, or a name or other stats, so as you go from one screen to another, you have all that info follow you around with the image. No need to create labels in all the screens for global info like that.
In summary:
make a new subclass of UIView or UIImageView in Xcode using the New File... menu. You would do new UIView if you will have other items than just an image.
add methods that allow you to set the image, update text stats etc.
BONUS: you can make the class handle taps, so if a user taps the image, you could do something like provide help or run a cute little animation
embed that object in any screens you wish. Keep in mind that you can have that view be sized differently in each screen using transforms. Cool, no?
that's pretty much it!
Good luck!