I am creating a dictionary-style app that presents a tableview full of words, and when a word is selected, a UITextView is displayed that shows the definition of the word. What I would like to do is add a line that says "See also: synonym1, synonym2" where synonym1 and synonym2 are links that will take the user to the definition for the synonym that is touched.
What is the best way to add these dynamic links? Buttons? Somehow add a small UIWebView a UItable on the fly?
Thanks!
I would replace your UITextView with a UIWebView and use that contain your description text and your links. It's fairly trivial to generate HTML on the fly for something like that.
You could register a custom URL scheme for your app, or you could intercept links as they're clicked.
If your links are always grouped together there's no reason why you couldn't use a bunch of UIButtons inside a custom view, but then you'd have to handle layout and wrapping on your own. It seems a lot easier to do it in HTML.
Related
I have some text that I need to load from an XML file. The idea is to be able to make the text interactive. I should be able to tell when a user taps a piece of the text, like in the WordWeb app. I know this seems to be the kind of job that a UIWebView is for but I want to avoid generating HTML and implementing handlers for the hrefs. I hope that made any sense.
Another way could be using a UITableView with UITextViews or UILabels as content views for the cells. However, I couldn't find out how we can customize the appearance of the table view, add a border to the view for example.
The end result expected is a view that looks like a page from a book but pieces of the displayed text can be tapped and bookmarked etc.
Am I even thinking in the right direction?
hi
I want to display drop down menu like the one you see in this image http://callingcard.marigoholdings.com/Screenshots.html#1
(below From and To)
How can i create that? Any good tutorial.
Best regards
You will have to use UIPicker for this purpose.This is used as a dropdown whereever needed in iPhone.
Please refer the link below
How to create drop down list box for an iphone app
Thanks
It looks like that app is using a combination of a UIWebView and an html select tag. To do something similar would involve a solid bit of html and javascript hackery, but in essence would be:
Create a UIWebView and inject the appropriate HTML into it to make the dropdown.
User uses dropdown as if it was in mobile safari and picks something.
When you need it, you use a javascript call with stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString: to grab the value of the dropdown by id and pass it back to your code.
There are a few gotchas here, mainly with constructing the dropdown and the webview such that it's big enough to show the expanded dropdown but transparent to see under it when the dropdown is not expanded, it's not scrollable, and that sort of thing.
I wonder if a UIActionsheet might be better ... you could easy make a button to call the sheet. Adding multiple buttons to the sheet transforms it into a table that you can scroll.
I want to make an e-book reader iPhone app. Should I use UITextView or UIWebView to display the text? Which control is used by other e-book readers?
I would use a UIWebView, as it gives you much more flexibility in the presentation of the text. According to the UITextView Class Reference:
This class does not support multiple
styles for text. The font, color, and
text alignment attributes you specify
always apply to the entire contents of
the text view. To display more complex
styling in your application, you need
to use a UIWebView object and render
your content using HTML.
Also, UITextView uses scrolling to display large amounts of text (it inherits from UIScrollView); in an e-book reader, you will most likely want to paginate the content, so you will not want the scrolling behaviour.
UIWebView is much better solution than UITextView mainly due to support of rich formatting of its contents. On the other hand you will miss some very important functions which you get for free while using UITextView. I'm talking mostly about searching inside, changing contents size etc. All of this is possible with UIWebView but it's not straightforward - css & javascript are for the help here
Did you get highlight functionality for this as font size can change. Save them for future so that when ever he came to same page can see them
U should use UIWEB view ,as to provide paragraph and other functions of text are not supported by text view, u can directly implement html code and can make the app with proper view of text. So my suggestion is to use web view.
What I am trying to do is create tooltip functionality so that certain words in my instructional app can be tapped and the definition pops up. For the popup part I plan on using code from “AFInformationView” which provides bubbles on the iPhone.
The part I'm struggling with is how to associate A particular word's location with the bubble. Currently I have the text on a UILabel that is on a custom UITableCell. Since I calculate the row height on the fly with:
[textToUse sizeWithFont:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:FONT_SIZE] constrainedToSize:CGSizeMake(stop-start, 500)];
I'm not sure what the coordinates for a specific word will be. I was thinking that if I created a custom DataDetectorType that could be the fix.
If anyone knows how to do this or has any other ideas I would be happy to hear them.
Thanks,
Andrew
I didn't create a custom UIDataDetectorTypes but Craig Hockenberry did something like it with his TwitterrificTouch.
He uses regular expressions to detect links and other things. I provide it with my keywords and then they become tappable. He places buttons on top of the matching text from the underlying labels. You can google a lot of posts that talk about "putting transparent buttons on top" of various things but Craig's code is the only example/working code I could find.
Here is the link:
http://furbo.org/2008/10/07/fancy-uilabels/
I don't think this is possible. The (few) Data Detector types that the iPhone currently supports are hard-coded with a integer type id. There does not seem to be a mechanism to extends that list of types.
File a feature request in their bug tracker. I will do the same.
AFAIK, you can't create custom data detectors.
The best approach for this sort of thing seems to be using UIWebViews. At least that's what I did. However, you shouldn't use a UIWebView inside a UITableViewCell. In fact, no subview of a UITableViewCell should respond to user input. So I think the best approach would be to display a UIWebView when the cell is tapped.
UIWebViews could be a possible approach but on scrolling you should consider that the whole text should be parsed to detect the words.You could use HTMl tags to make them blue and provide the links.But how could i then assign a custom behavior then opening in safari?
If you want custom data detector you could write an extractor method to primarly patch the links with help of NSregularExpression. For example
NSString regex = #"(http|https|fb)://((\w)|([0-9]*)|([-|_]))+(\.|/)"; to patch alll the links including Facebook URLs inside text like fb://friends.
Then you could use NSattributedString yo mark the links with different colors etc.
ThreeTwenty has a great library called TTTAttributedLabel where you could assign links to certain parts of a text. I also scrolls quite fast if you use it in tableviews
https://github.com/mattt/TTTAttributedLabel
We are trying to write a training manual application for the iPhone. On the top half of the screen is a diagram of a car engine, on the bottom half is some text. At the user repeatedly hits a "next" button, we highlight different parts of the engine, and in concert we highlight different parts of the descriptive text below.
We basically want "living text" in the text half, with the illustration following along on top to where the reader is in the text. What we'd like from the text is 1. user can scroll it using their thumb so possibly a UIScrollView 2. the software can explicitly drive a scroll to any part of the text (when they hit the "next" button). 3. the words in the text are interspersed with hotlinks e.g. "this is the camshaft... this is the piston..." and the user should be able to click on any of the keywords like camshaft, piston, and have the diagram highlight that. (The problem is not highlighting the diagram, its capturing the click). The text would have 300~400 buttons/links/keywords and about 600 words of text.
Since this is fairly similar to using a web browser, we tried using Apple's version of webkit using a UIWebView and handleOpenURL to register a service back to the app itself. But Webkit for internal links a popup comes up asking permission to access that link. Every single the user wants to go to a link (in our case just an internal event that we'd intercept so that we can highlight e.g. the camshaft). Tried to intercept the event from the HTML view, but that didn't work.
It seems like the best we can do is to abandon scrolling text, and make the text part more like flash cards or a power point presentation, breaking the text into custom UIViewCells with buttons inside a UIScrollView. However, this would impose an annoying constraint on the author that they would have to write everything to fit in the UIViewCells, sort of chunky.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
This is definitely something you can use a UIWebView for. Don't use handleOpenURL, rather, set your viewController as the webview's delegate, and override -webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:. When this gets called, check the request, and pull out your link data from there.
It would probably be easier to implement that completely in JavaScript in the document you load in a UIWebView. You would have to use JavaScript (i.e. [UIWebView stringbyevaluatingjavascriptfromstring:]) anyway to achieve things like scrolling to a certain position.