The iPhone shows applications icons, with the application name below ea. icon, on the screen 4 across and 4 down.
What is the best way to replicate this type of view in a custom iPhone application?
For example, I'd like to show a grid of players in a game I'm developing in a UIScrollView that shows a thumbnail of each player and their name. I'd like to show a maximum of 4 such "cells" per row and just keep on generating rows as needed based on player count (e.g. given 10 players I'd have 3 rows ... the first two would have 4 player thumbs and the last would have 2).
Is there a custom UIViewController for something like this perhaps?
Thanks
I would suggest using a UITableView with a custom UITableViewCell subclass. You could do it with a UIScrollView directly, but the table view implements some cell-reusing behavior that you'll probably want to utilize.
Depending on whether the performance on the device is acceptable you could either create a custom UIView subclass to draw the icon and label (cleaner), or draw them directly to the cell's view using the drawing primitives (faster).
Related
I want to be able to dynamically populate UIScrollView. Like how it is done for row views in UITableView. I have a class that takes in some parameters and creates the respective view when it scrolls. Currently I have 8 views.
These 8 views have different background image, image and label according to the page number it is currently in. However the basic skeleton for this view is the same. What i am doing right now is in ViewDidLoad I am creating 8 views and add them as subviews and scroll over.
I don't want to do this. I want to create three views and the rest i want to populate when the user scrolls a page and then a page etc. How do i do this? ANy pointers/tutorial?
First of all you calculate the ContentSize for the scrollview (when you want to use the iPad in landscapemode with 8 pages then the width should be 1024*8 = 8192px and the height 768px).
Then you should implement the UIScrollView Delegate method:
scrollViewDidEndDecelerating:
In this Method you check on which page you currently are with the contentOffset property of the scrollview and start updating your left and right hidden views..
Hope this helps you a bit.
Check the two most recent WWDC videos for two excellent sessions regarding expert use of UIScrollViews. Additionally you can review a brief tutorial here, written by the well known cocoa expert, Matt Gallagher.
I want to implement a grid view like the one in Pinterest
I thought about implementing as 3 table views. But I was not able to scroll them together well. When I implemented the scrollViewDidScroll and set the contentOffset for the table views other the scrollView , the scrolling became slow and unusable.
Another implementation I did was of was having a set of images to load and calling the viewDraw function in scrollViewDidScroll. The ViewDraw function just draws the necessary images and removes the rest of the images from the memory which were already drawn but wont be visible .
this too makes the ScrollView scrolling slow. And another issue with it is that there are white(background color) patches before the images are drawn.
What should be the best way to implement this grid view ?
Solution 1 (i don't know if this works and I don't like it very much)
How about having 3 vertical table views side by side, but forward any touch events from any tableview to the other ones. I understand that you had performance problems when trying to sync the tableviews, but maybe working on an event level things would work better. Maybe.
Solution 2
Use a UIScrollView (for the scrolling purposes of course). For performance and memory reasons you also need to implement a load-on-demand mechanism so that you don't load all your images at once.
To do this I would create a class, CustomImageStrip that handles a vertical image list. This class works together with the scrollview and uses contentOffset to decide when it is time to load/unload a image from the strip.
By having 3 independent image strip classes, the images can be of any size and don't need to be aligned. But, since they all belong to the same UIScrollView the scrolling will be done simultaneously.
I'm writing an iPhone app (which will be my first ios app) that has about 50 screens, each of which has the same background - where the background is an image covering the entire screen real estate and another image at the top as a banner.
Each screen will have some text along with 0, 1, 2 or 3 buttons appearing beneath the banner image.
What is the best design for putting this together?
The options I could think of were (in every each I was planning on having a root controller which is responsible for displaying each view as appropriate).
1) Have 50 separate screens as xibs (and associated view controllers), each of which contains the two background images plus however many buttons each particular screen needs.
2) Have 4 superclasses as xibs - (representing no buttons, 1 button, 2 button, 3 buttons) and have each of those contain the background images and as many buttons as appropriate. Then have 50 subclasses which simply just set the text and button content as appropriate using the superclasses instance variable outlets.
3) Have the root controller have a view which contains the two background images which is there permanently, and each of the 50 views displays its text and buttons on top of that.
4) (If this is possible, I need to check if a window can have images). Same as 3, except the root controller doesn't have a view, the main window displays the background images and each class displays its text and buttons on the top of this. So each view controller would have to load and display the text and button objects using code (in which case there's not much point to have xibs for them).
Is there another solution? Is one of these the "best" solution?
If I went with 3 would it not be possible to define the position text and buttons in a xib? (because in order to do so they would need a parent view in order to position them in interface builder, but if that were the case then when the view is drawn the background wouldn't be visible).
If 4 is possible, then the root controller has no view, therefore does it still need to be descended from UIViewController, or could it simply be descended from NSObject?
I think at the moment I am leaning towards option 2) as that way I can design all the views visually as xibs, but there are only 4 of them. Unless there is a better more elegant solution.
TIA
What you can do, is one XIB with all the buttons and then you would set then hidden accordingly. Although it would tie you up a bit. The 2) option is more flexible. The 3) is ok too. You could have one rootViewController, just to hold the images and then you could something like this:
[rootViewController.spaceForMyChildView addSubview: myNewViewController.view];
The "spaceForMyChildView" would be a view that would hold your child views.
I would do fusion between 2) and 3) probably.
UIWindow inherits from UIView, so can have anything within it. So (4) is feasible, though you're starting to get into tricky water if you want to support any sort of view rotation.
I'd think an inverted (2) would be the easiest thing — have a single superclass that upon viewDidLoad adds the background and top banner programmatically. Have your specific controllers inherit from that and design them graphically to contain whatever you want, mindful that the image and banner will subsequently be added.
That said, if your views are really as simple as a single text area and up to three buttons, always with fixed positions, then it sounds like a single view that repopulates its fields from a data source, as Jacky Boy suggests, is probably the smartest thing.
I wanted to know how can we design the view controller such that.., the upper half of the screen remains fixed and the below part of the screen can be navigated through.. !!
Should we use slipScreenController here ?
Your description sounds nothing like the Appstore app but the Appstore app simply has one vertical UIScrollView and another horizontal UIScrollView inside that for images.
If you are referring to browsing categories in AppStore then:
That is a tableView implemented in such way that it doesn't take the whole screen area. You need to create a UIViewController (not UITableViewController) and than add a tableView to the view (using Interface Builder or code). That way you can change the size and position of the tableView and use the remaining area of the view for something else, for example a UISegmentedControl above the tableView.
If you are reffering to reading description and images of single app then I think that UIScrollView is used for displaying images, not sure about the rest.
I want to add some custom buttons and realize the same effect like the iPhone's home screen. What I can think of is to calculate the position of each button and add them to the view. Are there any other ways to do this? e.g. add buttons to the tableview
Check TTLauncherView from Three20,
I realized the same view of the thumbnails in the photo app (which in principle differs only because of the background color and the rounded effect of the buttons) using a custom cell (with 4 UIButtons inside) in a normal tableview.
In my case, this is because I need to scroll up and down, in your specific case there should be a way to "lock" the table from scrolling. By the way, for this reason, it could be simpler to design the custom view in the interface builder, it is very quick to design such a view, and then create a custom controller to provide simple methods to assign icons and actions to the UIButtons dynamically.
You could also look at the Three20 libraries as already suggested, it is already implemented, but you app will easily be rejected by Apple if you do so.