Make buttons behind NavBar clickable - ios

So I'm working on a project where we are doing a custom header which collapses/expands as the user drags either the header or a scrollview/tableview.
In some cases we want to have buttons in the header that will end up where the navbar is in a collapsed state, which gets animated in a nice way to there.
So the problem is when the button gets behind the navbar (a transparent one) its not clickable anymore.
We tried altering the Z layer for the button and the "bringSubviewToFront" but none works.
We also tried to alter the height of the navbar according to this link but it seems as well its not working anymore. Also, just hiding the navbar would not be a passable solution as we sometimes will need the back button there as well.
screenshot
So if anyone have any good answer or workaround for this issue, it would be greatly appreciated.
We are using the answer in the appDelegate from this question to make the navbar transparent.

Look into using Hit Test, it should be able to do what you need:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiview/1622469-hittest

Related

"Print" & "Cancel" disappeared from Printer Options in UIActivityViewController

The buttons are still there and function fine, however as you can see they are completely invisible. Adjusting font colors and navigation bar colors had no effect. I have been trying to resolve this for months and despite reading Apple's documentation, I am unable to even see where you would change what I assumed to be a system wide function.
So to help narrow down this issue I created a simple navigation controller with a print button. If I put these both on the Login storyboard (the first storyboard) it works perfectly fine. If I put it on Main.storyboard (the second storyboard) it doesn't work.
If I change my project settings to make Main.storyboard the first storyboard it works. Leading me to believe the issue is in my FirstViewController.
You can set the color of the print and cancel button
UIBarButtonItem.appearance(whenContainedInInstancesOf: [UIToolbar.self]).tintColor = UIColor.green
After narrowing down the problem to the first view controller I discovered the tint was set to Clear Color (ie Alpha is 0). Fixing this resolved the problem in the rest of the app. I am surprised a setting in a view can propogate to the rest of the app and overwrite all of the other views in the process. Perhaps apple set the first view to determine the colors for system pop ups etc.

Highlight UIButton when not selecting the button itself

I have a custom class here that consists of a UIButton inside of a UIView.
The goal of this class is to allow users to have a greater area (being the UIView) to select the button than just the buttons frame itself.
Now when a user taps on the view I want the buttons highlighted image to show... But the problem is, it does not.
I've read many possible solutions to this issue For Example:
Calling: [btnObject sendActionsForControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside]
This however did not change the buttons highlight.
I also tried just settings the button.highlighted = YES;
But that did not work either.
I have the images for different states properly setup (Normal and Highlighted), I'm sure of that.
I also have the gestureRecognizer working properly as the functionality is great except for the lack of highlight.
Does anybody know if I'm missing any thing special that needs to be done in order to pull off this seemingly very simple task? Surely it's been done many times.
Thank you
You were on the right track. -[UIButton setHighlighted:] is just a flag. What you need to do is call setNeedsDisplay on that button right after you change the highlighted property.
I solved my problem a little while ago and I'm not sure if Kevin Low's answer would've worked too, it very well might have.
But for some reason, a UITapGesture doesn't work well with highlighting buttons as a view transitions (That might be because I didn't call setNeedsDisplay). The gesture that ended up working was the UILongPressGesture with a 0.0 sec for minimum duration.

Custom bar button item not detecting touch correctly

I have created two custom buttons in the nav bar's right bar button using storyboard like so:
Below is how they look. I've added background colours to the buttons for easy viewing of detectable area.
The problem I am having is that the map button on the right is only detecting touch events on the left side of the button. The left button is detecting touch events fine. What's even stranger is that it seems to work fine in the simulator, but not on devices. I've tried on multiple devices and they all have the same issue. This is driving me crazy.... been at it all day. Please help!
After banging my head against the wall for two days with this one, I finally realised that as of Xcode 7 you can finally just drag multiple UIBarButtonItems to the UINavigationItem directly in Interface Builder. Creating the two buttons this way instead of the previous method fixed the issue.

Full customisation of UINavigationBar

I'm currently building an iOS Application for a client and have hit a pretty huge roadblock. I mean, I could write my own UINavigationBar and such but that would cause a lot of issues further down the road.
I have tried everything in my knowledge so far and have spent several hours searching for a solution (overriding the CALayer, using CoreGraphics and pretty much everything else ) and I get the same result. No matter how hard I try to remove the background of the UINavigationBar, it still shows a white background with slight translucency.
I need to have a lot of customisation on the navigation bar (I.E having a gradient going from "blackColor" to "clearColor" and I can't do that if the background of the Navigation Bar refuses to be completely transparent. I have tried copying all of the CALayers from the UINavigationBar layer to a subview I added and it just kept crashing, even when replacing the delegates and superlayer.
I really need help with this. One of the multiple effects I'm trying to achieve are below. (The blue rectangle is not the focus of the image, it's irrelevant.)
To get it completely transparent:
(UINavigationBar.appearance()).translucent = true
(UINavigationBar.appearance()).barTintColor = UIColor.clearColor()
(UINavigationBar.appearance()).backgroundColor = UIColor.clearColor()
(UINavigationBar.appearance()).setBackgroundImage(UIImage(), forBarMetrics: UIBarMetrics.Default)
(UINavigationBar.appearance()).shadowImage = UIImage()
EDIT:
Using iOS 8.3 looking like this:
Or am I missing something?
You are referring to the top Navbar with the back button and Save button right? I'm just confused as to what the blue box on the image is in reference too.
Anyways, this is an extremely hacky approach but could work:
Set the UINavigationBar's alpha to 0. The Back button and Save button will probably also disappear but you could just add labels to the View Controller at the top in the exact same place. The button's should still be functional even though they are "invisible" but the user will still think they are touching them.
Again, very hacky, but you are free to play with the top part of the View then. I'm sure there's a better way to do this but I'm not near a computer with XCode at the moment and can't test it out, and this fix may not even work but I thought I'd offer up a possible temporary solution.

Unusually cool looking tab bar setup within a rootviewcontroller of a UISplitView

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) iView app for iPad, has great looking tab like setup within a rootViewController of a UISplitView.
The tabs named "Browse/Watch/Listen" are particularly interesting are they simulated or real tabs?
It's unlike any UITabBar I've seen around in iPad apps.
Does anyone know how something like that is possible?
The round rect button in custom mode will be transparent and any png image will maintain in transparencies.
3 or more buttons with transparent images would be the way to go. A different color for when they are selected and your all set. You could also make them look like they are overlapping with images that continue the button next to it.
With the iOS devices it is more about appearance and less about the underlying functionality.
This is a custom control, they made themselves from scratch.
Fortunately for you, you don't need to make it from scratch. :)
There's a lot of open source component that does just this, just like these ones.
Those tabs look and feel like 3 UIButtons. Notice how the UI highlight acts when touching the buttons, and the action is only triggered on touchUpInside.
The tab content is probably a UITableView which gets refreshed when switching tabs.

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