Today I opened my Blackboard (I'm a faculty member at un-named small American college). There's a new annoying floating blue question mark in the lower right corner. When you hover over it, it says "support", and when you click it, you are presented with a useless help menu.
The problem is that since it pops into and out of existence at just the wrong moment, you accidentally click it, rather than the "submit" button you were aiming for. I emailed my IT "Help" desk; they say it's a feature that they're testing.
Here's a screenshot of the annoying blue question mark
How do I get rid of this annoying blue support question mark? Thanks
No sooner than I posted, did I discover the solution. Digging into the html, I found that the annoying blue question mark is a Blackboard external tool provided by something called eesysoft.com. Using my privacy badger firefox addon, I just moved the little slider on the college.eesysoft.com field from green/allowed to red/blocked, and that eliminated the tracker from my browser. For good measure, I also edited /etc/hosts to block this tool at the local level. The same trick should apply to OSX, and I have no idea how to do this on Windows.
Here is a citation to a page saying that the thing cannot be removed or blocked.
I'll leave this question intact, in case it helps others avoid this annoying, useless, blue question mark.
Related
I was working through the swift tutorial:
https://www.raywenderlich.com/115279/swift-2-tutorial-part-2-a-simple-ios-app
On the section (about 1/3 way down)
But I'm noticing a problem when I attempt these steps in my xcode environment. I am able to successfully embed a navigation bar, but "double clicking" doesn't allow me to set the text at all, in fact it really doesn't let me do anything just highlighting the nav bar region:
See:
I can also put up code at request, but being this is so early in the project, I haven't coded really anything yet, it seems more like a UX challenge. Am I missing some particular setting in Xcode editor that allows the text to be highlighted, or has the guide skipped some trivial, but necessary step to making this work?
#sschale's answer is a good solution:
For user's that come across the post, it isn't obvious where that menu is. After some digging I found that you need to hit a certain middle icon (in the red box) so it is blue to find the form. Image attached:
Sometimes it can be hard for it to register there. You can edit it in the right sidebar directly, when the Navigation Item is selected:
Swift...
So I've got an existing app and I'm working on its appearance. The current task is customising the decimal pad that pops up when the user hits a textField.
I've looked around on how to make it but it always seems that you have to go into the iPhone/ipad settings and add the custom keyboard.
eg. This StackOverFlow Question
and they all seem to point to this same tutorial..
iOS 8: Creating a Custom Keyboard
My problem is that I don't want the user to have to go into settings.
So the question is....IS THIS POSSIBLE?
The following pic is what I want to use. I have made this in an XIB file through adding a target keyboard which makes the new folder with KeyboardViewController.swift , info.plist and NumPad.xib. Though i think I'm on the wrong track, can someone point me the right way please.
Also anyone know the exact dimensions this view should be.. assuming what I'm asking is in fact possible. Let me know if I'm not being clear enough!
NumPad.xib(pic)
Many many thanks,
Steve
SOLUTION: Thanks to Andrea for correcting my search keywords. It led me to this Stack Question which hopefully sends some others to the correct end of the internet that have mistakes custom keyboard with custom input views!
Sure it is possible without going into settings, but they are called custom input views.
You should look into inputViews here what Apple says about them Custom views for data input.
Basically when the user press a text field instead of loading the usual keyboard it loads an inputView that you specify, pay attention that custom keyboard term is misleading. If you google for tutorial you'll find most probably link like the ones that you found.
For a practical example check this tutorial or this, is a little bit old, but the principle are still the same
I am sure that this is a really easy solution for someone with IOS experience. My problem is as follows, (forgive me if my terminology in explaining the situation is poor)
I want to change the selected state of my text to be the character instead of the word Ace.
Initially the selected state is set to show "Ace" on the button as shown in the picture below.
I then paste in the appropriate character as shown in the picture below
However, when I do a command save, then toggle the button pointed to in the picture below back and forth from default to selected the text field reverts back to Ace instead of being as I want it.
Forgive me if this is really easy, but I can seem to figure it out. As I said, I have tried command save after changing it, but that is not working, I can't really think of anything else to try, and googling this answer is difficult as I am not sure how to even word the question without visually describing my problem as I have done here. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Wow, I just solved this right after I posted the question
All you have to do is click outside of the text field where you enter what you want the state to be and it saves it. Can't believe my headache was so simple...
Maybe I'm just searching for the wrong term, but I've been able to find very little information on this subject, and I think it could be a problem for my app.
A while back, there was an article on the accuracy of the touch screens on iOS devices, and it seemed quite poor compared to other phones. Here is a link a posting about it:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1660713
Anyway, many of the commenters referred to "perspective compensation" as a cause for the inaccuracy. Basically, they are saying that iOS intentionally registers touches above the actual point of contact to compensate for the typical viewing angle of the user or for the angle of their finger or something like that. I have found that there is some credibility to that claim myself by doing as one of the commenters suggested and trying to use my iPhone upside down. I did find that it was difficult to touch things in some cases, and I have also noticed this problem in one of the apps I'm developing.
So, in case you want to skip all that rambling above, here is why it's a problem for me:
I am developing an app that is intended to be used by two people at the same time. The iPhone or iPad is placed on a surface between two people who are sitting across from one another, and they are instructed to quickly and accurately touch items on their respective halves of the screen competitively. What the article's comments made me suspect might happen, and what I have also found in practice is that the person using the phone upside down will have trouble touching buttons and dots on their first try. I've also tested slowly with a stylus and found that the touchable area of a button does indeed extend below a button, or above the button for the person using the phone upside down, hence the discrepancy and problem/disadvantage for that person.
So finally, if you want to skip that also, here is my question: Can "perspective compensation"(if that's what it's called) be disabled programmatically, and can it be done for specific views of an app? Have any of you noticed this and dealt with it in an app of yours?
While I have found that "perspective compensation" does seem to be occurring, I have not found any official documentation of it, and therefore have no idea how or if it can be disabled. When I search for "perspective compensation," the only results I find are links to the same article and comments.
I can't help but expect that this may have been asked before or is solvable with a simple checkbox, but perhaps for lack of the correct term to use, I have been unable to find any leads.
Thanks in advance for any of your solutions or suggestions!
This can't be done with the current SDK. All we have access to is the touch location, which is at a single point. Other search terms you might try are "digitizer" or "raw touch data", but there is definitely no check box or simple option.
To implement this, you will have to compensate for the touch location yourself. You'll need to play around with a compensating offset value for the upside-down buttons. Hit testing on views is probably the best place to do this, then your buttons can just respond to events as normal.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I would like to add an integrated welcome tutorial to my app that just highlights a few buttons and educate the user what some features are. I remember seeing this I the google app. Is there a tutorial on how this is done or is it simply a video file that plays to look like the app..
Thanks
I'd agree with James, that rather than a video, a user controlled help/tutorial is better. Let the user control the speed with which the online help progresses and/or is dismissed. Even better, I like integrating the help into the app itself, e.g. show the user help/tips when they first visits a particular screen for the first time or where they tap a little question mark button for the tips/help to pop up.
I have to confess, though, that I've shifted my thinking regarding integrated help/tips in an app and now tend to consider it a design failure. If the app is not intuitive and discoverable, then I've failed as a designer. I can easily imagine apps of sufficient complexity where online help is necessary, but before you invest time in help/tips, I'd urge you to consider a user interface redesign that obviates the need for it. Some of the best apps out there are intuitive and don't have any help screens at all.
If you to do online help, though, the common solutions are:
Present first time users a series of full screen help pages that they can tap through one at a time at their own pace, with heavy emphasis on visual elements rather than text description. This is the closest to your original question. You could even animate the appearance of the visual elements on this help screen if you want (to give it a bit of a video-like feel), but let the user progress to the next screen (if you need multiple screens) at their own pace. (You can do this effect by having your main view controller determine if this is the first time the user's used the app, if so, use pushViewController/presentViewController to go to the help screen (and again if there are additional help screens), and then when done, pop/dismiss back to the main view controller.)
The first time a user enters a particular screen, either have little pop up help/tips that show up. Optionally you could overlay this help on top of the screen itself, dimming the actual screen behind it, so the user knows that they're in a different "help mode", with little pointers or other visual indicator linking your help to certain design features on the screen behind the help screen. (You can do this by having the relevant screens keep track of whether they've been visited before, and if so, overlay the help tips, which will be dismissed when the user taps anywhere on the screen.)
Put a help button which will cause user help tips to popup on the screen. A good example of this approach is Apple's iPhoto for iPad, which includes not only hints/tips show up next to the various controls right there on the screen, but also with links to more substantive descriptions where needed.
To wrap up, I'd suggest (a) redesign your app so help is not necessary; but if you can't (b) pick an app that does a particularly elegant presentation of online help and see if you can reproduce that effect yourself. I don't know of any good tutorials on how to do this, but frankly none of this is terribly complicated, so you really shouldn't have much of a problem reproducing the effect you want. And if you do hit a road block, come back to SO with the specific question on how to do a particular visual effect, and I'm sure we'd be happy to help.
You could play a video that looks like the app, but that's messy and looks silly if they want to stop it as it is clearly a video. A much better way would be to create your own custom overlay views which point to different buttons and give them info. With this implementation, the user is able to "stop" the tutorial whenever they want instead of having to view a video for 40 seconds with no easy way out; also you could add an option to see the tutorial again much more easily this way.