You know that in a lot of Mac/iPhone applications (such as your Finder), when you are dragging a icon around, all other icons will be "repelled away" from your mouse and leave space for the icon you are dragging.
I am wondering if that's a built-in Cocoa function (in layout constraints etc?). If not, is there any library, or documents on how to implement it?
If you want to get it more-or-less for free, use an NSCollectionView.
If NSCollectionView doesn't fit your needs, it's fairly easy to implement it using NSAnimation. Basically, the way that NSToolbar or NSCollectionView does it (for example), is to figure out where the icon you're dragging would land if you let it go, and it sends the other icons to their new locations using Core Animation to move them smoothly.
Related
I am working on a game using GTK3 as a rendering technique (terrible idea, but it's a school project).
My gameobjects are made of Image widgets and are placed in a Fixed container. It's working pretty well, however when i move widgets beoynd right or bottom border, the window automatically grows along with it.
I want the window to stay at the sam size, event if widget leaves its area and becomes invisible. It works when i move widget past the upper or left border.
I tried using gtk_widget_set_vexpand and gtk_widget_set_hexpand. My window is set as not resizable (gtk_window_set_resizable).
Is there any way I can achieve this?
This isn't the right way to use GTK+. GTK+ is intended for laying out widgets in a GUI program.
There are better options for animating 2D elements. One that works with GTK+ natively is the Clutter library. You can also integrate SDL or OpenGL or something like that if you so choose.
That being said, you can also use GtkLayout instead of GtkFixed, or put the GtkFixed in a GtkScrolledWindow and hide the scrollbars and set the scroll policy to prevent scrolling. It's still technically misuse, and in fact GtkFixed (and possibly GtkLayout too but the docs don't say) is really not supposed to be used anymore unless absolutely necessary because it doesn't give you automatic support for tricky UI layout problems, but it doesn't have extra dependencies.
I got an app that allows users to add content to a canvas. I would like to be able to offer the user an ability to move, rotate, resize, reflect this content. Currently I'm doing this with gestures, but would like to know if there is some sort of open-source widget that draws a box around the view and adds 4 buttons to do these functions:
rotate 90 degrees
rotate freely
resize
delete
Can anyone think of an open source framework that I can add to my project to create controls like the ones displayed?
I can probably build this by hand, but debugging gesture recognizers and view rotation is not the most fun thing, so I'm looking for something more polished.
Thank you!
Here's a link to an open source control on cocoa controls that looks like something you could use: TDResizerView.
"TDResizerView is used to resize and rotate an imageview with single finger"
Sounds like a good place to start from, even if you need to modify it.
I've never used this particular control though, so take my word for what it's worth.
edit: Also keep in mind that on iOS, users generally expect gestures. Forcing them to use the handles instead of pinching or rotating may be bad for your user experience, depending on why you want the handles instead.
I need to make an app very similar to the LA.Com iphone app. Specifically, I need the sliding top menu with sub menus. I wanted to know if this is already made by someone and is available for download? I couldn't find anything yet.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/la-com/id403739318?mt=8
Thanks
You could use a custom slideview, as you see they've got two slide views the biggest one that "spawns" the items on the smallest one, the dark gradient effect is easily reproducible by overlaying an image, they also change the "selected tab" appearance, using the white one with the arrow pointing to bottom.
This UI is reproducible in UIKit, but they might have used a tool like titanium or so on. . .
Personally I don't like that interface, a tab bar is standard but is more useful: spinning a wheel on the top of the screen is not comfortable, and also you can't have all the elements in sight to reach them with a glance...obviously this is personal, if you need it you need it ^^!
All you ios architects out there, please help me choose architecture/technology for the following iphone/ipad app.
The app itself is a financial app, but we want more of a game look-and-feel of the app, so we probably don't want to use the builtin looks of the cocoa widgets. The elements on the screen will probably be some kind of blob-shaped images.
The app will essentially have five "blob"-shaped areas, spread out evenly across the screen. One of the blobs will be centered and larger than the other ones. Within each blob there will be clickable areas which will pop up "details" and menu-action blobs. These blobs are also graphics objects and must not take over the whole screen. The blobs should animate nicely when popping up. The graphics elements will have a couple of lines of text, which are generated, so the overlaying text itself cannot be part of the static background-image.
The main user interaction will be swiping within the center blob, displaying summaries of the items that are conceptually contained within the blobs underlying data store. Now and then, the user will drag and drop the item to one of the other blobs. While dragging, the item should be traced by a line and when dropping on the other blob, the item should be animated to look like it's being "sucked into" the blob.
Now, what kind of technique would you suggest for this app? Is Cocoa suitable in this scenario? Should I use a game framework like Cocos2D? All kinds of suggestions including example code snippets are most welcome.
I realize that this question might not be as straightforward and to the point as questions generally are on SO, but I hope your answers will come to use by more people than me. Thanks!
EDIT (MY SOLUTION):
I eventually ended up doing everything in UIKit, which was a lot easier than I expected.
Briefly described I used UIButtons with Custom style and an image background, which gave me full control over the visual appearance of the "items". I also found it very useful to manipulate the underlying CALayer of many of my other UIViews. It is often easier than drawing things from scratch using Core Graphics programming.
Another thing that was useful were the UIGestureRecognizer:s. I found them useful for both handling "real" gestures like swiping, longpress etc, but also for handling normal "tap" for UIView classes that aren't subclasses of UIControl. Two examples are UIImage, UILabel and UIView itself. That way I could handle taps for these simple classes. I could for example use a normal UIView, modify it's CALayer to change the look of it completely and still handle taps. Using this technique, I didn't have to subclass any views at all in my app.
The animations were pretty easy too, even though I had to use a non-public method to use "suck" animation, so my app will never pass App Store moderation. It was just a prototype anyway so I don't care.
When this app will be for real, I will probably implement it in HTML5/JavaScript wrapped by Phonegap. The reason for this is mainly reuse of existing mobile web services and also for code reuse across platforms. It will probably also be easier to hook into the existing security solution when using a webapp.
Cocos2d is great if you need to move elements around really fast as it is a layer on top of OpenGLES. I think from what you have said the UIKit will be fine, you get nice animation support, you can do some nice things with UIScrollViews to handle moving elements around etc.
If you need more detailed graphics support and lots of moving elements, particle effects etc then by all means go for Cocos2D but be aware that in Cocos2d the application works more on a scheduled update method, i.e. you get notified every 1/60th of a second to move stuff draw stuff etc, whereas with normal UIKit approach it is more event drive, i.e. I click a button and show a view etc.
I am in process of creating a multiplayer game similar to the Scrabble / Wordfued / Rummi. I am trying to see what would be best way go about implementing the UI and their interactions.
I would be having a framework which would keep track of all the pieces on the board and the AI for knowing if it is a valid move.
I am trying to figure out what could be best solution to handle the UI part. The game board would be larger than would the current iPhone screen could support. So the board would have an effect of a scroll view. The same goes for the game tiles using which user can play. These are not fixed amount of tiles/cards and the same could be more in numbers which would also need another scroll view kind of effect.
There would be many more effect's were the user can move a complete set of tiles/cards from the board and place it in another location of the board. Or even a tile in between the set of tiles on the board.
So I am trying so see if I should go with two scroll view provided by iOS and handle all the detaching the tile/card from one scroll view and placing the same in GameBoard scroll view
Or
Should I go with something like cocos-2d which provides more advance game UI handling capabilities.
Please do let me know your thoughts and feedback on what could be the best choice for the same. Thanks in advance for all your help.
Words With Friends uses native UIKit views. It is quite simple and uses a transition to move between the two degrees of magnification (close up and not close up).
You can do everything quickly in UIKit with a UIScrollview. You can use drag events to move tiles around the screen, even changing their perspective/look during dragging. Using UIAnimation would allow you to do simple frame based animation for things like dropping a tile.
Cocos2d will be quicker if you already know a similar gaming library. However if you choose it you you'll miss out on using Interface Builder and a lot of conveniences in UIKit.
If you're starting from a base of zero with either approach, then only use Cocos2d if you want particle effects (like stars and sparkles, UIKit has nothing for this).
Otherwise I'd say try UIKit, it's easier and there are more resources on the web.