I am porting an iPhone app over to the Android platform. One of the views has a very large list of data and on the iPhone app, there's a scrollbar of sorts on the right hand side that displays the letters of the alphabet and allows the user to quickly scroll through the list this way. I am having trouble finding such functionality in Android. Is there a simple way to implement this?
I think this is implemented through AlphabetIndexer, though I have not tried it personally.
The Android way to do this is to make the list filterable using the keyboard, like a Blackberry. You should do it this way to fit in with the platform experience.
To implement this, you call the setTextFilterEnabled(boolean textFilterEnabled) method on your list view. See example below:
myListView.setTextFilterEnabled(true);
For a complete example, see Hello, ListView.
If you can't use that, then you can use the fast scrolling like seen in the Contacts application. This is not a public API yet, but you can implement it from the Contacts source code at https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Contacts
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Right side Alphabet indexer with working sources
http://hello-android.blogspot.com/2010/11/sideindex-for-android.html
Related
I'm fairly new to iOS and was wondering if there was a way that I could search for a word in a game and pull up a definition. I have a splitviewcontroller, one view is moving objects for the game (irrelevant to the dictionary portion) and the other view is for the dictionary.
Does the iPad/iPhone have built in dictionaries for different languages, not just English that I could use?
I was thinking I could also use a site like http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hello and search it but I don't know what that would look like while the app is running (ie,if it would search it and display it in the viewcontroller instead of popping up a window).
I'm pretty sure UIReferenceLibraryDictionaryController (described here) uses the device's language.
I've already implemented a sidebar like that in Facebook/Path apps with ECSlidingViewController but I've noticed that Spotify app it's a bit different and has a very slick effect. The sidebar is not already full visible but it slides and show the icons as more as you swipe with your finger. How to animate the sidebar in this way?
Here an image for a better explanation.
Take a look at MMDrawerController https://github.com/mutualmobile/MMDrawerController
It has nice sample app and allows custom sliding effects, including the one you are looking for
There are many such libraries available to implement the behaviour you have asked for. I would recommend ECSlidingViewController since its easy to use plus it supports StoryBoards:
ECSlidingViewController
As i said there are a lot of different libraries to implement the same thing. You can also check the link HERE that contains a whole list of similar libraries.
I have seen a few grids made with UITableView but I don't really like how close together each cell is to the other. If there is a way of creating a grid system like the home screen on an iphone (the screen after it is unlocked) if would be great. I don't need an exact solution but a point in the right direction, maybe a set of libraries to look through would be great. I am running xcode 4.4.1
Thanks!
The key is UIScrollView has a paging mode (since could have more buttons than fit in the view). It's covered here's in Apple ocs:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/WindowsViews/Conceptual/UIScrollView_pg/ScrollViewPagingMode/ScrollViewPagingMode.html
If you use that, each 'page' would have n buttons/views that when clicked would call a protocol/delegate call back for the consumer with the data to handle and it would evenly layout the UIView/buttons across that page view. Contact me if you want my sample.
You probably don't want to require iOS6 as a minimum requirement but if you do, you can do as H2CO3 suggested in the comment and us UICollectionview. Here's a tutorial: http://www.raywenderlich.com/22324/beginning-uicollectionview-in-ios-6-part-12
There's also some open source launchers that you can look into their code. Here's some (I'm sure there's more).
http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/sespringboard
Code is at: https://github.com/sarperdag/SESpringBoard
Also: http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/openspringboard
Use UICollectionView. You can create grid type views using that. It is available in iOS 6.
If you can target iOS 6+, use UICollectionView. It's one of the best new things in iOS for years and it will be as important as UITableView.
The layout you're asking for is only a few lines of code.
NSHipster has a good explanation of UICollectionViews and Ray Wenderlich has a good tutorial.
(There's lots of example code out there, but here's a very simple example project I did recently for another question involving UICollectionViews)
I'm still fairly new to the iOS development scene, so I'm not totally sure where to look for open source controls, etc. The app I want to build will have multiple collections in it. I'd love to have a view where I can swipe up and down to browse between collections, and then swipe left and right to scroll though that particular collection -- all on one screen.
The app I've seen that basically resembles this is the "Popular" screen on the Mobli app for iOS.
I'd be grateful if anyone has seen something similar already built that I could base it on instead of trying to program a new view from scratch w/ my still limited knowledge.
The ScrollView sample project from apple does this, you might want to to take a look at it.
As for reusable components, those are few and far between. It's difficult to protect a XIB in an external library, and beginning developers tend to have trouble getting static libraries to work in their project anyway. Github is where I look for OSS code I can use.
is it possible please to build small application with interface builder without coding, just to make sure that my interfaces are well organised ?
For the navigation interface, no. You need to programmatically push views into the navigation stack.
Interface Builder is a layout tool for individual screens. Connecting them in a navigation flow happens in code.
I second #fluchtpunkt's comment that you might want to look at publishing your content as an iBook rather than a native app. Or you could look at one of the html-to-native-app solutions like PhoneGap or Appcellerator. I've never worked with either of them, but theoretically if you have any HTML ability at all, they flatten out the learning curve of simple app building very significantly.
If you just want to test your interface you should probably use a mockup tool. I have good experience with blueprint. Or try something like interface (http://www.lesscode.co.nz/interface). Here you can create a GUI prototype and export it to XCode (maybe you can run the app at the simulator with navigation after this operation…) but i don’t know because i haven’t any experience this tool!