I have one part of my site which takes a long time to load. This makes the site appear to hang when you click a link to this. I know it will happen and so it's fairly mean to not tell the user that they are waiting for something which is meant to happen. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to render some kind of loading screen with a simple loading spinner animation to show the user that the server is working. I was thinking of creating a new view which would automatically redirect to the actual view but I thought this would be a bit messy. Any better ways?
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Everyone has seen the classic didFinishLaunchingMethod run amok.
Well now that we have additional things to consult when starting up like CloudKit, that are, to make things worse, asynchronous, the app delegate seems like the wrong place to do even the most basic stuff like asking if they have accounts and establishing syncing, or grabbing a snapshot.
I hate the idea that those things would go into the first controller that the app would launch, flashes me back to 4GL tinkertoys from days of yore.
Yet, we have to honor the flows of the storyboards. I have found nothing searching around on this. And sadly the most extensive Apple example, Lister, is not a great source for best practices.
It's suitable for the app delegate to trigger the start of this work, but not to handle the results. Often you want some way to display progress / errors / request user info. So, having some form of 'splash' view controller which handles the transition from your launch image into this process and controls the flow into the main app is handy. Generally the logic for this kind of thing is reusable in other situations so that part should be in some other controller class. The storyboard can make the splash VC the initial controller and the app delegate can create and pass it the data controller class which deals with the logic and updates the VC (it's delegate) with the results. Often the splash VC will then pass the data controller on to the subsequent VC it displays, though that isn't required of course.
As the title, my app will occasionally show a black screen at launch, but I don't know why.
When I press the home button, then entered it again, I saw it was running well. It seems the window could not be made visible randomly. But I don't know when or why does it happen.
You likely don't have a launch image set. When apps are loading their resources they display a launch image, you likely don't have one, which is why you get a black screen.
The reason it doesn't always appear is because if the app is in the background, but still alive, it keeps its resources available for a quick start from the background. It then does not need to display the launch image.
See the Apple documentation
I would say, that there is something wrong with the NavigationController/ViewController stack for Your application. I've had similar situations with exact same problem.
What You can do:
It is pretty hard to suggest something - usually needs tinkering around with the stack structure (maybe try to simplify the stack (remove unnecessary navigationControllers / any tabbarControllers?
Create a separate project, with the same navigationController/ViewController structure, to replicate the problem, upload somewhere, give access to us and we can take a look. But probably - when You will start tinkering around - You will fix the issue Yourself.
I have a messaging system, theres a inbox view and a viewmessage view, if i go back to the inbox im still reciving data from that message, and if i load another conversation between me ad another user its still loading the previous conversation data i had (verified by logging the convo's, and the new one i have open, and its a continuous loop so to say... basically im trying to figure out how to totally close out a view... i seen dissmissViewController and used that, but all it does is visually make the view go away... it doesn't truly close it.. whats the method to call to do what im trying to achieve?
These are all modal views, my app uses no navigation views due to the nature of the app
edit: i found some great documentation that im going to look over hopefully i'll get my answer from there.
Using Delegation to Communicate with Other Controllers
I am working on an app in which there are several screens and each screen has the same layout, just different data passed in, then I want the user to be able to swipe from one screen to the next.
So far I got something working using the UIPageViewController project template using the transition style UIPageViewControllerTransitionStyleScroll. What I have done so far works ok, although its resource intensive because it instantiates a new view controller each time I swipe to a new page but I am loooking into working around that.
The thing I am concerned about is that it is not strictly a page application in the sense of ibooks so even though I am able to make it look like a scrolling app, using the transition style setting, I wonder if there is a reason why people seem to only use this template for book type apps, unless I am mistaken
Also there seems to be an alternative approach of using a UIScrollView and PageControl to do similar functionality
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/PageControl/Introduction/Intro.html
I am not sure which approach is better to solve the problem I am trying to fix, so am looking for some feedback. Each page will need to be a separate instance of a view controller as there are several elements to display on each page.
Using UIScrollView is much more difficult. If you're targeting iOS 6 you should almost certainly use UIPageViewController. If you're targeting iOS 5 then UIPageViewController might not be perfect because the only page transition available is "scroll" which looks like a page flip.
If you're worried about the resource usage, you can reuse view controllers.
See the WWDC 2012 session 223:
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2012/223/
I was wondering what would be the best configuration of view controllers and views for an app that I’ve been planning out. Conceptually, the way I would like to lay out the app is with an initial loader/browser view, likely with document thumbnails. When a user chooses to open one, a new view comes up that forms the main document-editing mode. The user can also choose to bring up a third view that contains an alternative document-editing mode.
I suppose this is very much like the way the Pages for iPad works, with first a row of document thumbnails to choose from, then the main word processing view, and accessible from a popover a third page setup view. Document browser view, and two document editing views.
Now, I can think of, and have been playing around with a few different set-ups, but in each case I can see problems that I’ll be running into later. So really, I’m looking for advice on a configuration that you think would keep things as neat and manageable as possible.
I hope this is not too open a question, and I would very much appreciate any answer.
Thank you,
I will probibly get shot in the head for making a suggeston like this, but I'll make it anyway:
In learning iOS programming, I spent a lot of time studying (as most people do - and as is taught by every tutorial on the planet) on how to use Navigation Views, and toolbars, and all the standard type views that assist in different types of navigation.
On the latest app I have been working on - I spent a lot of time and frustration trying to figure out how to best characterize what I was doing - and moreso trying to fit it into what the iOS frameworks would use to implement this stuff. Then (of course) I got stuck trying get things to do what they weren't supposed to - like when a navigation view wouldn't let me use the "back" button to jump out of the navigation herirarchy I'd set-up, etc.
In short - when I stopped worrying about the specifics of what all these different types of views and controllers were - and how they interacted and how I was supposed to do it - and started worrying about how I wanted my application to work - and working from a basis of generic views, custom toolbars, etc - the whole think made a whole lot more sense.
In my case, I liked the look-and-feel of the Mapquest app - and they way it dealt with toolbars that your could open and close from the top and bottom of the screen - which had buttons - which could switch to other views etc. So I started using "generic" views to implement this functionality - and the whole entire thing clicked together.
So in-short:
1 . I'd decide how you want it to look and what you want it to do
Use a third-party app as your inspiration, if needed
Decide when/where/if some of the "standard" practices apply - and use them where/when they do.
Have fun!
-BKG