UISearchBar: Changing the appearance - Shape, Background, Overlay an Image - iphone

I'd like to change the appearance of the default UISearchBar. As an example, how would you recreate the search box in the Google iPhone app as seen below? How would you overlay an image to produce this effect?
(source: isedb.com)

Upon some investigating of possibilites to customize the search bar, I'm inclined to say this is a custom component that has nothing to do with UISearchBar, but instead recreates its functionality.

You don't need to subclass anything.
Create a new UIView that has the buttons and text field and then when then entire view is going to load do this:
[self.searchDisplayController.searchBar addSubview:customSearchBarView];
Make sure to set the new text field as the first responder so it has access to the keyboard.

Related

How to change the UISearchBar from round to rectangular? [duplicate]

I'd like to change the appearance of the default UISearchBar. As an example, how would you recreate the search box in the Google iPhone app as seen below? How would you overlay an image to produce this effect?
(source: isedb.com)
Upon some investigating of possibilites to customize the search bar, I'm inclined to say this is a custom component that has nothing to do with UISearchBar, but instead recreates its functionality.
You don't need to subclass anything.
Create a new UIView that has the buttons and text field and then when then entire view is going to load do this:
[self.searchDisplayController.searchBar addSubview:customSearchBarView];
Make sure to set the new text field as the first responder so it has access to the keyboard.

How to have a bordered UIBarButton Item with both Image and Text - Like in Mail

In the Mail app on iPhone, when the user taps Edit, the toolbar shows two buttons, Delete and Move. These buttons have both image and text while appearing as bordered.
I tried to recreate this effect, but I have not really succeeded. Here's what I've tried:
The obvious way of setting the image and text properties. This results in some weird button with the image on top and the text below it.
Initialize the UIBarButtonButton with a custom view set to an instance of UIButton (described here). This button can then not be set to be bordered, instead it appears as a flat view (without shadows either).
I could obviously create a button and then add an UIImageView as a subview to the toolbar, but then I have to care about device rotation and some other stuff I would like to avoid. Also, I think Apple doesn't do it this way; when you select an email in Mail while in editing mode, the button label is updated with (-number-), which moves the image slightly to the left. It looks like the text and the image belong together.
So I wonder whether anybody did something like this?
Most likely these are UIButtons with stretchable image backgrounds. That's how I would do it.

How to implement this UI

Just curious if the tab bar UI element in screenshots is some built in class or customized.
If it is customized, then please give me a hint on what classes I might check to have something like that.
The first screenshot is initial tab bar. When I tap on the last icon the tab bar smoothly(animated) resize itself as on second screenshot. If I press the edit button the icons are shaking(as on iPhone home) and I'm able to arrange them.
first
tab bar http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/3899/photo2aw.jpg
second
more buttons http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/5673/photo3kq.jpg
The tabbar in the top image could just be a standard tabbar with a non-standard color scheme.
The bottom image is a custom element most likely implemented in an UIActionSheet.
Gotta say, this is a butt ugly UI using non-standard (and therefore confusing) elements. I wouldn't suggest trying to emulate it.
Looks like it's custom. You might just want to look at subclassing UIView and putting a bunch of buttons it stored in a NSArray. That way, when you re-arange them, you just have to move the objects to a new position in the array.
You should be able to achieve the shaking by using simple UIView animations.

iPhone UIImage overlapping text

I have a view with a UIScrollView, UIImageView for a background, and a UITextView. I have created several other views just like this and they all come out okay - with a background image and scrollable text but for some reason, now I can't make that work. Either my image overlaps all of the text so that I can't read it or the UITextView default background (white) shows up so that the user can't see the background image. What could be causing this problem?
Do you use Interface Builder or build the views hierarchy in code?
In both cases you should make sure that the order of your views is correct.
In IB the view that you want to appear on top of all the rest has to be under the rest of the views.
In code, make sure that the text view is the last to be added to the hierarchy.
You could also use the next code in order to check if this is the problem:
[self.view bringSubviewToFront:textView];
Okay, it must have had something to do with choosing the delegate. I can't say that I completely understand how I fixed it but it had to do with declaring the delegate in IB.

iPhone dev: adding an overlapping label to the image

I'm trying to figure out a best way to implement the picture-editing capability shown in the native address book app on iPhone.
On the built-in address book, this is how the picture looks like before editing:
qkpic.com/2f7d4 http://qkpic.com/2f7d4
And after clicking edit, notice how "Edit" overlay is added and the image becomes clickable:
qkpic.com/fb2f4 http://qkpic.com/fb2f4
What would be the best way to implement something like this? Should I make the image a button from the beginning and have tapping disabled at first? If so, what steps are required to add an overlay/label to the image (in above example, gray border + the text "Edit" is added)
The easiest way is to use Interface Builder, create a container view, then add a UIImageView and UILabel as subviews to it. You would position and style the text and the image but set the UILabel to hidden. Make the whole container view respond to touches. It's easy to do since UIView is derived from UIResponder so all you have to do is override touchesEnded. Whenever you want to change the text label, just set the UILabel to hidden=NO.
There's more to it, however. Notice how the image has rounded corners? You'll want to override the UIImageView's drawRect method to implement a custom drawing routine to do that. There's lots of sample code around and it wasn't part of your original question so I'll stop here.