When I've learned that I have to write some code to make the iphone keyboard go away. I was quite surprised. I was surprised even more when it become apperent that it is just the top of the iceberg.
What are the expected UI behaviors that aren't provided by system OOTB?
Is the list below complete?
The expected UI behaviors:
Focusing next text field when [done] is hit
Hiding the keyboard when background is hit
Using Touch Up Inside to fire a button action. (To give user opportunity to change his/her mind)
Supporting the screen rotation.
Some of that is silly, but some of it has uses as well.
Focusing next text field when [done] is hit
Which field is "next"? If you have a large form with fields both next to and above/below each other, next might not be so obvious. Even if they are in some linear layout, the iPhone would have to work to figure out which one is next. Do you want to wrap around at the end of the form, or dismiss the keyboard, or submit the form?
Hiding the keyboard when background is hit
I mostly agree with you here, though there are a few cases where this is useless. For example, adding a new phone number in the contact app.
Using Touch Up Inside to fire a button action
This one I really don't get. I can only guess that it's designed to allow you to use buttons instead of the touchesBegan/Moved/Ended methods. I guess it could be useful, but I've never used anything but Touch Up Inside.
Supporting the screen rotation
Many apps just don't work in any other orientation, such as games. If you want to use rotation, you only have to add two lines of code assuming you've done your layout well.
I hope this helps explain some of the strangeness. Aside from the keyboard dismissal, I've never really found anything too annoying. The one thing I wish they supported was using the highlight state of UIButtons for the set state. It would be a quick and easy toggle button, but I've taken to screenshotting a highlighted button and using that for the background image of a selected button.
Want a rounded rectangular button that isn't white? Since that one uses a background image, you can't just click something somewhere that makes it the color of your choice. You have to create your own image or you could even use CSS (WTF!?) to do it.
Unfortunately, the iPhone SDK lacks a lot of helpful things one would think would just be there. However, many people have taken the time to write wrappers for many of these kinds of things to help facilitate development - a quick google search into the functionality you are expecting may turn up a lot of useful answers!
For example, you could make the keyboard go away when you tap outside of it by creating a new view when it appears, and placing that view behind any user-interactable views on the screen. When that new view is tapped, it will become first responder and cause the keyboard to slide away (because the UITextField is no longer first responder).
Such a thing could be easily implemented as a drop-in fix for pretty much anything you'd need it for with very little code.
Still should have been included in the SDK in the first place, though!
Related
It seems like there should be a simple answer to this, but my searching doesn't turn up an answer.
I have a few controls in a UIViewController that resides in a Container View within another UIViewController. When a user taps one of the UITextFields, all the controls in the container view controller move up to accomodate the keyboard being present. I DO NOT WANT THIS ACTION. I simply want them to stay put. I've tried a lot of the obvious solutions, but none are satisfactory.
I have tried some solutions to counteract this behavior, including catching the Notifications for keyboard events and trying to counteract the animations. I do not want a quirky anti-animation. I simply want the controls to stay put when the keyboard is dispatched.
It seems like nowadays (with iOS 6.1) there should be a way to do this just with IB, but I do not see one.
Edit: For example this post: disables the animations, but the controls are still relocated. I do not want them to move at all. Moving them back to their original location is not ideal, rather disable them from moving at all.
It seems like back in iOS 4 or so, you had to move the keyboard yourself, manually. Now it's done automatically, but not always desired. I just want to disable it.
How do you setup in your application to show little bubbles with text and block the rest of the screen from being used and only allow a small section / button to be pressed. I am wanting to create a walkthrough to show users how to use the application and where to find things within the application when it is opened for the first time.
I would like to dim the rest of the application except for the part I want them to click on. Is there a framework already with these features?
There's no frameworks that provide this functionality, as far as I know.
One way you could do this though is to have a set of overlay images which you overlay over the whole screen the first time the user goes to that screen. To determine if the user has already been to a screen, I suggest you look at NSUserDefaults. To create the overlay images, I'd make the image the full size of the screen (i.e. 460x320 if you are showing the status bar) and then have transparent sections where you want to "see through" to the element below. Add a gesture recogniser to the overlaid image view to detect a tap and then hide the image and set the flag in NSUserDefaults to make it not happen the next time the user goes to that screen.
If you don't get a better answer, you could look at MAAttachedWindow on the page at this link. It's written for Cocoa, not Cocoa Touch, so you would have to convert it. I am considering doing this myself. You might find it to be worth the trouble, but I haven't looked at every detail, yet, so I couldn't say for sure. There are only tow files that are involved (.m and .h).
In terms of providing a nice text popup for users in an iPhone application, after they click on a help icon, what approach/style do people recommend?
In my view (re User Experience) I would have thought something that say:
has a thin border with rounded edges around it
takes up most of the screen
has a vertical scroll bar if there is more text than can fit on one screen
has a way for the user to dismiss
Interested in:
recommended approach re UI design
how to implement (which IOS UI objects to use)
nice to have - example code
The thing about designing iPhone UI elements, including popups, is that you're very strongly recommended to do it "Apple's way" - follow their Human Interface Guidelines and use standard UI controls. The two ways I can think to do this offhand:
Use a UIAlertView for a single chunk of text - it includes buttons for dismissal, properly shaded and colored for consistency with the rest of the OS and other apps. This is a quick, one- or two-line way of putting text on the screen and taking it off again. The downside: there's no scrolling capability, and the box scales with the text you put in it (i.e. you can't fix a size for the view).
Use a new view (in a UIViewController) presented modally. This option gives you more flexibility and the capability to scroll, but at the cost of greater setup.
If you decide to go the second route, follow your existing instincts for how to lay it out - you'll take over the entire screen on an iPhone, so you have some wiggle room. Your rounded-edges guess and vertical scrolling are right on (consider a UIScrollView for implementation).
In my app, I have a button that triggers an action. However, I'd like to do the following instead.
If the user taps the button, then trigger tapAction.
If the user holds the button down for, say 1 second (getting a sense of the right length of time here would be great, too), then trigger holdAction instead.
Many standard apps seem to have this capability, so I'm certain it's possible. If you could point me to the right place in the documentation, that would be great.
Thanks.
The answer to this question should cover it. The question talks about UITableViews but the method is the same for any UIView :)
You should take a look at UIGestureRecognizers to see what else is out there.
So, in an iPhone app I am working on, I've decided that the best way to display all the contents to the user is to have the top part of the screen show some information, and the bottom of the screen show different information. However, the bottom part will change sometimes, so I was working on implementing that.
Another app that does this is the MTGLife app, here are some pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/HILMaJPnbLxP6hQRkn_6XA?feat=directlink
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/d5wpS8x_aRyAEOBpYYIxwQ?feat=directlink
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/RW-BQfqx-VytRim3BxeRZQ?feat=directlink
You see that upon hitting a button, the picker switches over and displays the log. Hitting the same button switches them back, with a pretty animation. I would like to do the same thing in my application. I'm not sure the best way to go about it though...
I was thinking that I would make 2 UIViews, and then would simply flip between them, but I want to get some opinions first on how to do this, and then a push in the right direction.
Thank you!
The 2 UIViews is a good approach. By using the UIView animations functions, you can switch between the Log and the Picker with the desired transition.
In the UICatalog sample application (see TransitionViewController), there an example on how to animation two subviews