I need to display text in an iPhone application, something like the way a book is displayed, for example:
Heading
Sub heading
The actual text of the book. Blah. Blah. Blah.
How would I go about doing that? I've found the UITextView and UITextField and UIScrollView objects, but I can't figure out how to use them properly... Any suggestions?
I hope that makes sense...
You could use HTML in a UIWebView. Or layout a view with multiple UILabels set for particular fonts/sizes/properties. Then use a UITextField for the rest of the unformatted text.
In desktop cocoa you can use attributed strings, but I don't think those are available for the iphone.
As Ryan said, you can use HTML with a WebView, but if you want to stick to native text drawing, you're going to have to drop down to CoreGraphics and draw all the text by hand. This is a lot of work, but if done right it will be more efficient and have a lower memory footprint than using WebView.
Edit: just took a look at your requirements again, and if only the heading and subheading require style changes, then I would recommend just using separate UILabels for those. You can also call -sizeToFit on the UILabels after assigning their text/font properties so they'll fit their text, which will let you handle wrapped headers/subheaders.
Related
I am pretty new to iPhone development and currently working on an application which includes a view that performs a simple numerical calculation. In particular, the user enters 3 or 4 values into text fields and the view displays the result. Something along the lines of http://www.moneychimp.com/calculator/compound_interest_calculator.htm
What is the nicest way to achieve this? I am currently using simple UITextFields and a UILabel for the result but it doesn't look nice or "native-like". What UI object would be best to use?
Thank you!
It's entirely up to you. You're using the right classes for actual input- it comes down to how you choose to style those classes. I'd suggest looking at the documentation for UIView and CALayer (youView.layer, and include QuartzCore framework in your project).
A good start might be to choose a color scheme, a background for your app, and the look and feel you're shooting for- this will inform your styling. Try looking for apps that you think are elegant and attractive, and boil down what they do and what you like about them.
I'd say;
use a grouped table style (with the white tables with round corners on a blueish striped background)
embed settings values directly in the cell (aligned to the right) as much as possible
you can show a relevant keyboard (text, numbers) or picker view to let the user pick values, directly when they tap the cell. Use sliders and switches where relevant.
You may want to take a look at http://www.inappsettingskit.com/, we are currently investigating it for the same purpose and it seems to do the job
You can use either a UISlider or a UIPickerView if some of your values have limits.
You can use UISwitch for toggles.
You can also switch the default keyboard for your textfields to be numeric.
Other than that you seem to be on the right track.
Also, sometimes putting a view inside a scrollview makes things seem cooler even if its only one page. The auto bounce on scrollviews is kind of cool.
I'm new to iPhone development, and I have a question on how to create a view for my application.
The view should display a problem (using formatted/syntax highlighted text), and multiple possible answers. The user should be able to click on an answer to validate it.
Currently, I am trying to use a UITableView embedding UIWebView as contentView. That allows me to display formatted text easily.
The problem is that it is a real pain to compute and adjust the height of the cells. I have to preload the webview, call sizeToFit, get its height, and update the cell accordingly. This process should be done for the problem and the answers (as they are HTML formatted text too).
It's such a pain that I am planning to switch to something else. I thought using only a big UIWebView and design everything in HTML. But I looked at some articles describing how to communicate between the HTML page and the ObjectiveC code. This seems to involve some awful tricks too...
So... that's it, I don't really know what I should do.
I guess some of you dealt with such things before, and would provide some greatly appreciated tips :)
The catch here is that the iPhone API does not yet support NSAttributedString so you can't just set the text to appear as you would like in a textview.
I saw one work around which essentially used individual UILabels to represent each attribute run. (Can't find the link now.) They used NSString UIKit extensions to calculate the position of the strings on the view and then used that to position the labels.
Another work around would be to draw the strings with their attributes to a UIImage and then just display the image. That would be the easiest solution I think.
In either case your going to have to basically recreate the data structure of an attributed string.
NSAttributedString does a lot of work for us. We really miss it when it is gone.
I want to implement a view in an iPhone application that is essentially like a rich text document. I need it to be click-editable, and I'd like to be able to embed graphic objects (either an overlaid view object, or manually drawn in graphic) with the text wrapping around. much like you would expect in a word processor. That's about the minimum functionality needed. Changing font for certain text would be a bonus (bold, size, etc).
UITextView would be a great start for me if it supported media like graphics embedded.
I'm still very new to Cocoa and Obj-C. Where should I start?
UITextView will not be nearly sufficient -- it has a very well-defined and simple functionality. That is an extremely complicated thing you're trying to do, wrapping text around an image -- you'll have to use to manually render the text in your drawRect method and do some very complex collision detection and calculate the string sizes etc. It's do-able, but extremely complicated.
Now, if you don't want the text to hug the image, but rather have the two appear on distinct lines, then you could fake this with a UITextView, then a UIImageView, then a UITextView, manually changing size and offset of each as the text changes...but this is a cheap hack and not exactly extensible. It could be sufficient for your needs, however.
UITextView does not allow rich formatting (bold, italics, different sizes, colors...), so that too would require a custom sort of text view.
Basically, it's a pretty big undertaking. If you're really committed, I recommend what Alex said -- get very, very comfortable with UIKit and Objective-C and iPhone coding in general. Then research how to make a rich text editor in other languages more suited to the functionality, and try porting that to the iPhone.
Hope this doesn't sound too discouraging. It's possible, but it won't be easy. And always bear in mind that the iPhone is a phone. Is it really the best platform for your application?
You might start with a much smaller, unrelated project. A viewer is no problem — start with UIWebView, which can render a RTF document for viewing. Creating a document editor, however, is no small task.
I know you can do it on Mac OS X with NSAttributedString but I haven't had much luck with that on the iPhone.
I'm trying to basically do a string like "$200" except the dollar sign is replaced by a custom symbol.
Here's a post I found regarding NSAttributedString on the iphone. Have you read through it? There're some good ideas there.
I think you can take a look at the Three20 library, it helps you to put HTML texts with inline images into labels and table cells.
You can create a custom table cell and use the interface builder to layout the image and the string in the correct position, if you want to add more labels and images, feel free to do so, but remember to add value to the Tag so that you can later on set/get the values of the labels and images. Instead of using the default table cell, use this custom table cell. Hope that helps.
I think you can't do what you want to do.
but nothing is impossible friend.
One way i can sugges you the :
--> Use UIImageView for your custom image at appropriate place.
--> Take UITextField along with it to display your actual price.
it will solve your problem.
NSAttributedString does not exist in UIKit on the iPhone.
If you can find a Unicode glyph to use in place of your custom symbol, that is the easiest solution. There are glyphs for every currency symbol in the world if that's what you're trying to do.
If you must use an image, you can't mix images and text with a built-in class. You will have to create your own UIView subclass and implement drawRect: yourself to draw the image and the text separately.
Is it possible to use the CFAttributedString type to draw formatted text on the iPhone? I see it in the documentation, but I can't figure out how to actually draw it to a context.
Three20 has a formatted text field. Basically Joe Hewitt implemented a light HTML interpreter to render the text, so it is much faster than a webview. fast enough to be used in a tableview.
The workaround is to use a WebKitView. Format your text as HTML and display in a mini web view at whatever size you need.
Actually, it turns out this is answered in the iPhone documentation, I just didn't read it carefully enough:
iPhone OS Note: While Core Foundation on iPhone OS contains CFAttributedString, there are no additions to the APIs in UIKit to add specific attributes such as font, style, or color, and there are no APIs to draw attributed strings.
There you go, no free formatted text. Bummer.
Kyle
There's an undocumented method on TextView to pass in HTML formatted text (it's really a kind of web view underneath). A number of apps in the store make use of it, just make sure your app works without it there.