I am new to IOS development. I am trying to add simple TextField for entering Occupation. I would like to show the user some matching suggestions as they user type (from a set of occupations that I already have). This is a very common usecase. Is there a idiomatic ways of doing this? In Android there is an AutoCompleteTextView in the standard view library which takes in an array of suggestions during initalization. I could not find anything similar in IOS.
You can use some 3rd party libraries available for Auto complete text field
but
the best and easy approach from my perspective is to use UITextField and at bottom add UITableview. So the concept is when you type any character in textfield you need to filter some data from tableview and reload tableview
Check the below link you can get the suitable answer from here...
Getting autocomplete to work in swift
So basically I have made a storyboard based app which consists of table views and text. It is designed to help new programmers like a handbook. You have a table view which allows you to choose a language, a table view which allows you to choose a section (eg initialisation) a table view to choose a subject (e.g. integer) then a text view of how to go about this.
When it was reviewed, they said
Did not include iOS features. For example, your app was just largely
text table views. It would be appropriate to use native iOS buttons
and iOS features other than just web views, Push Notifications, or
sharing.
I feel like adding these things would degrade from the simplicity and educational purpose of the app. Also, I feel it might be more difficult to navigate if its all iOS button based. Also it might be more difficult to add things later.
So how would you go about adding these things to a table based app so that it can pass the review? I just don't know what they want me to add/change. I have just added a title page with a background image and iOS buttons that direct to the main section a small section and the contact us page. What else can I do?
how would you go about adding these things to a table based app
I'd start by trying to forget about what I'd already done (since that was rejected) and ask myself: how can I design this using the tools available so that the user can quickly get to the information they need?
UIPickerView comes to mind. Instead of going through three screens just to say what you want, a picker with three sections would let you select all three parameters at once.
It'd be nice if you could provide access to the information in the app several ways. What if I want to browse through all the topics? Do I have to choose one section at a to,e, or can I just start reading? A search feature would be nice, so I can find stuff even when I don't know what section it's in. A tab bar and search field would be useful for these.
Perhaps the most important thing is that however it's designed, your app should look polished. It should look like you spent time making it useful and beautiful. Give it some personality.
I am very new to iphone application development and am struggling to create a table view page where each row contains a left-aligned label with an editable text next to it - just like how it works in the email account details page in the settings application on my iphone.
I have been googling the subject for hours and it is now somehow clear to me that I need to add UITextFields to UITableViewCells, but it is still not at all clear to me how I make these text fields take up the right amount of space:
How do I make the text fields align above each other?
How do I make the text fields expand as far as possible to the right?
How do I prevent the text fields from hiding part of the left-aligned label?
Read the Apple Docs on Tableviews there are a number of predefined table cells. Also look at the Tableview programming Guide. Pick the one that has the font characteristics that you want and Apple will take care of it for you. Also, in the Settings app, the settings are a Grouped style.
For the look you are describing I think it is called UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle.
You need custom UITableViewCells and there are a number of ways of making them. For your purposes, any one of the techniques detailed in the Apple documentation will probably suffice.
An alternative to those approaches is in GSUtils (full disclosure: open-source library written by me), where you can use the same approach to designing your table view cells as you would design a UIView.
I'm implementing a document viewer with highlighting/annotation capabilities for a custom document format on iPad. The documents are kind of long (100 to 200 pages, if printed on paper) and I've had a hard time finding the right approach. Here are the requirments:
1) Basic rich-text styling: control of left/right margins. Control of font name, size, foreground/background color, and line spacing. Bold, italics, underline, etc.
2) Selection and highlighting of arbitrary text regions (not limited to paragraph boundaries, like in Safari/UIWebView).
3) Customization of the Cut/Copy/Paste popup (UIMenuController) This is one of the essential requirements of the app.
My first implementation was based on UIWebView. I just rendered the document as HTML with CSS for text styling. But I couldn't get the kind of text selection behavior I wanted (across paragraph boundaries) and the UIMenuController can't be customized from within UIWebView.
So I started working on a javascript approach, faking the device text-selection behavior using JQuery to trap touch events and dynamically modifying the DOM to change the background color of selected regions of text. I built a fake UIMenuController control as a hidden DIV, positioning it and unhiding it whenever there was an active selection region.
Not too shabby.
The main problem is that it's SLOOOOOOOW. Scrolling through the document is nice and quick, but dynamically changing the DOM is not very snappy. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to recreate the magnifier loupe, so my fake text-selection GUI doesn't look quite the same as the native implementation. Also, I haven't yet implemented the communication bridge between the javascript layer and the objective-c layer (where the rest of the app lives), but it was shaping up to be a huge hassle.
So I've been looking at CoreText, but there are precious few examples on the web. I spent a little time with this simple little demo:
http://github.com/jonasschnelli/I7CoreTextExample/
It shows how to use CoreText to draw an NSAttributedText string into a UIView. But it has its own problems: It doesn't implement text-selection behavior, and it doesn't present a UIMenuController, so I don't have any idea how to make that happen. And, more importantly, it tries to draw the entire document all at once, with significant performance degradations for long documents. My documents can have thousands of paragraphs, and less than 1% of the document is ever on screen at a time.
On the plus side, these documents already contain precise formatting information. I know the exact page-position of every line of text, so I don't need a layout engine.
Does anyone know how to implement this sort of view using CoreText? I understand that a full-fledged implementation is overkill for a question like this, but I'm looking for a good CoreText example with a few basic requirements:
1) Precise layout & formatting control (using the formatting metrics and text styles I've already calculated).
2) Arbitrary selection of text.
3) Customization of the UIMenuController.
4) Efficient recycling of resources for off-screen objects.
I'd be happy to implement my own recycling when text elements scroll off-screen, but wouldn't that require re-implementing UIScrollView?
I'm brand-new to iPhone development, and still getting used to Objective-C, but I've been working in other languages (Java, C#, flex/actionscript, etc) for more than ten years, so I feel confident in my ability to get the work done, if only I had a better feel for the iPhone SDK and the common coding patterns for stuff like this. Is it just me, or does the SDK documentation really suck?
Anyhow, thanks for your help!
Does your document have any semantic components other than each paragraph? If you already have some concept of sections or pages, I would recommend you render each one of those as an independent tablecell. It's pretty simple to create a tablecell that makes you forget you're actually looking at a UITableView. All you would need to do is override drawRect: and setSelected: and setHighlighted: and tah dah! No More cell dividers unless you want them. Furthermore you could do some nifty things by using a tableview as your base. If you defined sections in the UITableView then you could have a nifty header that scrolls along as you're paging through your document. Another thing you could do is add a "jump to section" bar / a bookmarks menu, and that way you don't have to provide selection across the boundaries of sections.
Massive copy paste blocks would be pretty painful on the system as well. Further, if you went through the trouble to provide this content you might not want to make it too easy for someone to copy it all at once... (Can't follow this line of thought more without more specifics on your project).
If you really do want to provide the copy paste options you could add buttons to each logical page or section that immediately selects and copies the whole section for the user's convenience. (Maybe with citation associated?)
I recommend you lookup the UITableViewCell UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource in the SDK docs as those pages will significantly help if you choose to use this suggestion.
Just two random observations:
Can you afford to create a paging interface? (As opposed to “endless scrolling”.) It looks like a paging interface would be a lot easier on system resources.
The UIActionBar is actually the UIMenuController class. The interface is a bit weird, as the menu is a singleton (wtf?), but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring it out.
Hope that helps.
Here's a potential solution, but I don't know if it's crazy. Since I'm still so new to iPhone development, this might be a big no-no.
Anyhow, I had the idea to render each paragraph of the document (whose dimensions I've already precisely calculated) as a cell in a UITableView. Since UITableView already has mechanisms for cell recycling, I wouldn't have to implement that from scratch, and the document could be arbitrarily long without causing resource consumption problems.
Of course, I'd want to get rid of the line separators between cells, since I want the UI to look like a document instead of a table.
Or maybe I could render each page of the document (like a typical PDF, this is a paged-document format) as a table cell, and override the cell-separator graphic to look like a page boundary...
But would it be possible to get rid of the default touch behavior within the table, and instead implement text-selection on the table cell contents? Would it be completely impossible to implement text selection that crosses paragraph boundaries (between multiple table cells)?
The UIWebView is a good choise, but we need another application to pre render the pages percisely using each font and each style sheet and store the rendring information into a database table:
chapter_id int primary key,
startlocation int,
end location int,
fontsize int (or stylesheetname string)
Using JavaScript we can calculate how many words fit in a div with out scrolling.
UIWebView is good as it provide rich content and it has selection and highlighting behavior.
Hope this helps.
I am creating an iPhone app which I would like to have a similar interface to the iPhone's native contact picker view, i.e. an alphabetical list which you can scroll through, with a search bar up top which narrows down the list. Particularly, I'd like to be able to show the letters of the alphabet down the side so that as you scroll through the list, you see your position in the alphabet in the scrollbar. The problem is that my data basically consists of key-value pairs, not contact data, so I can't easily use the native contact picker.
As far as I can see, I have two options to achieve what I want:
Use the ABPeoplePickerNavigationController class and hack it to use an address book which I fill myself with non-address type data. The problem with this is that, by default, the address book will fill up with the contacts from the iPhone so that each time the app opened, I'd have to flush those contacts and build my own list. (Not to mention other problems associated with using an interface which is bound to a particular data structure)
Use a UISearchBar and UIScrollView. This would be fine, but I'm not sure how to do anything to the scroll bar except change its colour - I can't see how to override its contents.
Any advice on which is the simplest way? What are the pitfalls (particularly of 1)?
To get the letters down the side, you can just provide a -sectionIndexTitlesForTableView: method in your table view datasource. As for searching, there's a bit more work there, and it's very dependent on your data. A UISearchBar is the place to start, however.
For a search bar, have a look at TTSearchBar in the Three20 library.
Everything else can be easily implemented using UITableView.