I'm looking to customise the behaviour of a UITextView quite dramatically - adding in regex-based highlighting, line numbers and find and replace - as I essentially want to create a text editor on the iPhone/iPad.
I've been looking through the UITextView reference but it seems to be very restricted, not very customisable at all. I don't really know the underlying frameworks very well, so any help would be appreciated. My lack of in-depth knowledge notwithstanding, I want to do something pretty advanced, so any help at all would be really really appreciated.
My best,
Jamie
Unfortunately what you're seeing with UITextView is exactly what you get. It's not designed to support the kind of features you describe.
In the latest iPhone OS your best bet would be to deploy a Javascript-based editor in a UIWebView. Do the text handling in JS. Yeah, that's probably no fun, but unlike UITextView it's actually possible.
Alternately code your own text view from the ground up. Again, no fun, but has the benefit of being possible.
If you have access to pre-releases of future iPhone OSs, watch for new improvements and features. Apple's demo of Pages for iPad clearly uses something more sophisticated than the current UITextView, and the iWork apps supposedly use only public APIs. That would imply something closer to what you need will be available in a future release.
Related
I want to show my designer something so he ccan build it for my iPhone app.
Is there any website or tool in which I can easilie draw something with iPhone patterns or something and show him what I want to have?
some easy and free tool I have been using in the past: http://mokk.me/
But beware - it's still in beta, but compared to other tools which require either Adobe AIR ( http://www.balsamiq.com/ ) or are bound to a single platform (Mac, Win) and somewhat expensive this is a really good way to draw mockups for an iPhone App.
These are some of the tools for iOS. But most of them are at a cost. you can try whichever is convenient for you.
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/
http://graffletopia.com/
http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/iphone-gui-psd-v4/
http://balsamiq.com/download
http://keynotopia.com/
https://gomockingbird.com/
Another approach would be to use the "Storyboard" feature within newer versions of Xcode. Even though it's designed to produce actual interfaces for programs, it also works well as a high-level design tool for describing a sequence of screens and how they relate to each other.
In my current project, I'm not using a storyboard for the actual UI (because I need a little more control over view logic than it allows) but I do use it to sketch out how the visual portions of the application should appear and how they should interact with each other.
i'm looking for a objective-c class that supports syntax hightlighting a string.
is there something like that existing?
this should work on iphone!
Firstly, it really depends on what programming language you need to process, so you should include that.
Secondly, while I don't know of any syntax highlighters that are written in C or ObjC, there are several written in JS. You could load up the code in a UIWebView and run the JS syntax highlighter on it. That would probably work pretty well.
You'll have to do this yourself, unfortunately. But if you check iPhone OS 3.2, there are some helpful bits in there. (There is an NDA in place, so more can't be revealed directly in this public area. Check out Apple's dev forums.)
Though CoreText precisely does what you want in Mac OS X, It's not yet available on iPhone OS 3.1.X. However, Syntax highlighting is far more easier if you use javascript based highlighter as pointed by Colin
Is there a quick-reference guide to the iPhone SDK that's as fast and easy to use as one of those little O'Reilly books, or JavaDoc?
I'm new to iPhone SDK programming. I need reference material. Let's say I want to know if the string class has a "reverse" function. For Java I go to http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ and browse down to find "String". Then I can see everything about String, with hyperlinks to Serializable and Character. I don't see a "reverse" method, but look, there's a hyperlink to StringBuilder -- aha, there's StringBuilder.reverse(). Total elapsed time 30 seconds.
For the iPhone I go to http://developer.apple.com/iphone and log in. Everything seems to be slower here. There are fewer cross-links than in the Java documentation, and each link seems to pull in a big page that takes a long time to load. Just the page for NSString takes 30 seconds to load fully. Maybe I just don't know my way around the documentation yet, but it seems to be much harder to browse for what you want. There's no equivalent of flipping through a book, or if there is it takes 30 seconds to turn the page.
The iPhone platform is immense -- for almost anything you'd want to do, there's got to be a class somewhere that does it. The built-in help in XCode is good but I'm still lost with it.
How do YOU go about finding that class you need? Is there a better way?
I just use XCode's built-in help system. Right-click a class or symbol name, and choose "Find Selected Text in API Reference". You can also do "Jump to Definition", which will open the header file where that symbol is defined.
More info on this stuff here.
When I started with iPhone dev I used the iPhone Developers Cookbook, it has examples of how to do specific things. It's easy to pick out one piece of functionality to try out.
I'd highly recommend checking it out.
Use the XCode hot keys to jump to documentation on anything - in XCode for Leopard, you can double-click on something like "NSString" while holding down "Option" and it will take you to the documentation for that class. You can do the same thing for method names.
In Snow Leopard that key combo opens up a little help box with a summary of what you clicked on, "Cmd-Option double-click" brings up the docs as with Leopard.
The built in docs are very good and even provide links to sample code (if any exists for the subject in question).
There's also a way to generate your own XCode compatible documentation with Doxygen, just like you could with Javadoc:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/creatingdocsetswithdoxygen.html
If the speed of browsing documentation is the issue, I recommend downloading the related doc sets and browse them locally in Xcode. In Xcode's preferences, select the last "tab" (Documentation) and click the "GET" button next to the documentation test you want. (I'm on Snow Leopard and Xcode 3.2, but it should be similar on Xcode 3.1.x as well.)
If finding what you need is the issue, I second #paulsnotes's answer — the "cookbook" approach is very helpful form a task-based exploration standpoint. Also, when you find something you were looking for, and it took much longer than usual, provide feedback on Apple's documentation. Each page has links at the bottom. You can suggest what classes, sample code, etc. would be useful to cross-link to make it easier to find what you need.
If we are recommeding books, this is excellent for a beginner, it gets you up to speed very quickly while leading you through creating highly functional apps you can use as a jumping point for your own:
Beginning Iphone Development
In the past I've done web application development using Visual Studio. Initially I'd use the design view, editing the page visually. But over time I learned more and more (X)HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I became familiar with the tags for ASP.NET server controls and their common attributes.
I got to the point where I'd do all the markup by hand (still in Visual Studio though) and then test the site in an actual browser. Of course I'd also still use Visual Studio for programming server side functionality in C#, but never the WYSIWYG page editor. I was able to get work done faster too, getting the site to look just the way I wanted, and the same across different browsers.
Now I'm going to be taking charge of a public facing website (entirely static content - no ASP.NET, PHP, or anything). The website was created and maintained using Dreamweaver, which I don't have and never used before.
I'll be working from home, so the organization is looking into getting me a copy of Dreamweaver. Even though it's not money out of my own pocket ...
Is it worth using Dreamweaver if I probably won't touch the visual editor?
Or should I tell them to save their money and I'll just use Notepad++.
Or am I crazy and should relearn to use a WYSIWYG editor?
I do 95% of my web dev stuff using Dreamweaver's code editor. But, for the other 5%, the WYSIWYG stuff really comes in handy.
Plus, it's not your money anyway. I'd say get it and if the WYSIWYG stuff is too much for you just keep it in source code mode and use it as an editor.
You may not know until you see the code. If they were using things like Dreamweaver templates, unless you are going to extricate them, you may end up needing Dreamweaver for sanity sake.
Dreamweaver is really useful if you maintain a site with templates. If the site is in PHP or ASP, then all you need to do is put the common parts (header, footer etc.) in a separate file and include them in the different pages. If the pages are static then the common parts can't be included. Which means that if you want to change the menu, you have to change it in all pages. With dreamweaver, you can save a page as a template and when you create a new page from a template, dreamweaver stores it in the comments. Next time you update the template, all the pages that use the template are updated. I found this to be the best use of dreamweaver.
I haven't used a WYSIWYG HTML editor in years, all the HTML I produce these days is hand-coded, and it's something I would recommend to anyone. WYSIWYG Editors simply make it far too easy to throw in tons of unnecessary markup, and then you end up with unwieldy pages that are tricky to work with and hard to fix browser compatibility problems in.
However. If you're taking over a large existing codebase that has been produced this way, I'd say you probably want to make sure you at least have access to Dreamweaver or a similar editor (if they were produced in Dreamweaver, that's probably the best choice). Simply because many pages designed in this way are rather verbose, and can be a nightmare to deal with in a text editor.
This depends - you mean old school Dreamweaver or CS4 Dreamweaver?
With all the new additions (code hinting with some of the newer javascript frameworks, a "preview" that is integrated with webkit so you can see your page in action, being able to test AJAX calls and do a "code freeze") I'm tempted to walk away from jedit and try it out.
I believe that DreamWeaver gives you intellisense in the code editor for HTML, so I would use it for that, if you're not paying for it. I wouldn't pay for that myself though :)
If the Visual Studio editor works fine for you, there is no point in switching.
And if you don't like WYSIWIG editing, then there's no point in learning it. I stopped using WYSIWIG years ago, and like you, I've found it to be much more flexible and reliable to edit HTML/CSS by hand.
If you like DreamWeaver more and the organisation is willing to pay for it, then go for it!
FWIW, I do a lot of HTML and javascript coding in dreamweaver's code view- the JSF extensions are nice as well. I got it as part of the CS3 bundle, since I needed to get my hands on photoshop and illustrator as well to carve up graphics. If possible, try to get your company to get the whole bundle, since graphics manipulation is always important when you're maintaining a site- and most designers will be giving you photoshop source files. I never ever go in wysiwyg mode, and it's still useful.
I use dreamweaver, but not for the same reasons as everyone here seem to. I like the syntax highlighting, and I absolutely LOVE the way Dreamweaver handles FTP in the window on the right. If I could find another editor that would offer these two things, I would, but none seem to be that great.
I code my pages by hand usually (I do a LOT of PHP, which dreamweaver 8 obviously can't preview) so I do a lot of things like (1) edit page (2) upload changes (3) preview live on testing server. However, I still use the WYSIWIG editor occasionally, especially if I need to throw something together using tables or form elements. I just find it to be a bit quicker that way than doing things by hand.
That said, I never use Dreamweaver (8, mind) for CSS, as the implementation is buggy at best. I much prefer to do CSS and more complex HTML by hand. I also do not use the standard method of templating, as I prefer to have one "index.php" that calls in the appropriate template and stuffs data into it that it generated before.
All that said though, Dreamweaver offers a nice enough set of tools that I don't really want to leave it, and it certainly won't hurt to learn it, especially if its free. I'd say at least try it out and see if its going to work before making a final decision. It comes down to what you personally prefer to use.
I hand-code but there are times Dreamweaver is incredibly useful:
Making visual-tweaks to someone else's complex HTML. It's much quicker to use the WYSIWYG if you're short on time and the code is a mess.
Dreamweaver has got an incredibly good search and replace. The tag-based searching is the best I've seen anywhere for you whilst the regex seach/replace allows back-references, named groups in the replace field etc.
The code Dreamweaver produces isn't too horrific and it's fairly good at not breaking your own nice code if you ever dip into the visual editor.
I use dreamweaver CS5 for code only on a daily basis, and it's a great tool. It is very effective, and its a great tool even for people who already know how to write code. Some of its' features that make it one of the best editors, in my opinion, are:
Code coloring
Customizable color-schemes
Error highlighting
in-app validation
Autocomplete & Codehinting (works great!)
in-app FTP
New document type dialog (great for quick start)
Search & replace
Code Snippets
There are many more features, like setting up a local server and binding it to a database so you can write queries more easily and use dreamweaver's "help" with server-side code, but I haven't really got into it.
Bottom line:
If you are considering getting Dreamweaver mostly for code editing, then I'd say it's definitely a great deal - even if you aren't going to use some of its' other features.
Dreamweaver's a tad bloated for something which you really can just do in Notepad (++ or otherwise). No WYSIWYG will give you code to the same quality as hand-crafted code. Especially since it's vanilla HTML, just use an everyday programmer's text editor. Having intellisense isn't that important: I mean, there's only about 10 tags you need to know.
Just wanted to get an idea for ways (web) developers get round the short fall of (most) WYSIWYG editors, whereby the users that are editing the text aren't always HTML literate enough to produce good/great results.
In the past we have resigned ourselves to either locking down the editor or simply not supplying one.
What are other peoples experiences?
If I understand your question correctly, my advice would be to allow basic text formatting in the editor (bold, italicize, underline, paragraph breaks, etc). Anything beyond that should be handled either by custom fields in your CMS system that talk to the corresponding template, or directly by your designers / front-end people. There really should be no designing going on in your text editor.
Also, using a templating language like Markdown might help editors feel more comfortable formatting their pages.
If you have the resources (as the question implies you do) you get the users to supply copy and designs in what they do know (Powerpoint, Word, Fireworks, etc) and get the people who can do a correct implementation (but who might not be able to write decent prose, etc) to put it into the HTML/CMS/magicthing.
Sometimes it is possible to use something like WYMeditor - it isn't that simple but produces clean semantic code. The other way is using some wiki-like code - Markdown for example. And you can ease editor's life by using some helpers like MarkItUp editor (it also supports original Wiki and Textile).