I am working on the initial stages of an app and would like to employ the design implemented in lynda.com’s app for iPad. My question is what design patterns are they using to create the Playlist table on the left hand side which flies in from the left when the scene appears? I’m guessing it’s a view with a tableview that is added as a subview to main screen. The reason I’m trying to use something like this is to move away from the SplitView paradigm so I can have more screen real-estate for the right hand side of the screen. See screen shot below.
Thanks.
Related
I'm making an app for my Independent Study, and I have a UI functionality in mind - I just don't know how I would go about implementing it.
It's very simple in theory.
I want to have an initial view that fills the screen. When the user swipes up from the lower middle part of the screen, I want to do something that acts similar to control center, but for it to be a view that allows for me to choose between each of the 7 days in the upcoming week, displayed as icons with tags, and the user can swipe through them similar to how one swipes through the pages of apps on the home screen.
Similar to control center, the view should animate by sliding in from down to up, take up only part of the screen (In my case, about 1/5 of the screen as opposed to control center taking up more than 1/2) and the view behind it should of course remain running.
I am a beginner with iOS trying to get on my feet.
My question really boils down to this: I am unsure of what View class to use in interface builder for this, and whether or not this requires a segue/new view controller.
My initial thought was to drag and drop a View into the top level view, set its boundaries to how I want it to end up, then set it to hidden until I handle a swipe up, at which point it animates by sliding up.
I have done my best to describe my question but I am willing to clarify further if needed.
You can use 2 scenes in StoryBoard.
One as the mainView and one as the controlPanel.
Design as you like. You can detect user calling it by using UISwipeGestureRecognizer. And call the segue to that controlPanel scene.
On the controlPanel scene, you should set the backgroundColor to clearColor, and add another UIView on it with blackColor and alpha 0.5f.
To present it above the mainView, use modal presentation.
I have a SpriteKit game where I want to blur only a part of the screen (the board where the game is played). But at the same time, I want to be able to interact with the other elements (like UIButtons) on the screen. So basically I'm looking for something like a form sheet, but one that blurs what is under it and allows interaction with the main view controller.
So here's my problem. I've tried to:
put the UIVisualEffectView on my main view controller,
present another view controller modally with one of the standard presentation styles and have the UIVisualEffectView in there, or
present another view controller modally OVER full screen / current context and have the UIVisualEffectView in there.
None of these options work for me.
Options 1 and 2 don't actually blur. They produce a solid black box instead. (Although for some reason it blurs when I get a notification or when I pull down Notification Center or pull up Control Center. So I'm facing the same problem as this user.)
Option 3 does blur, but does not allow for interaction with the main view controller.
Does anyone know what else I could try? Or am I not using something correctly?
Unfortunately UIVisualEffectView simply doesn't work well with SpriteKit, even when using SKView. I've tried everything from A to zPositions.
I decided to recreate my UIButtons in the new view controller and present it modally OFS. That way I have access to the beautiful UIVisualEffectView blurring (SKEffectNode blurring isn't pretty at all IMO) and to my buttons. I hope Apple will work on the synergy of their frameworks in future versions of iOS and Swift. Then again, I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to app development, so if there is anything else I could've done I'd love to hear it :-)
I am trying to figure out how to create a "Now Playing" view similar to the one in the Music app and the Spotify app.
Here are a few images of what I'm trying to re-create:
Creating the view is not the problem. The part I'm having trouble with is how to keep the view on the screen at the bottom with the now playing information on it, but then when clicked, flicked, or swiped up, make it show like a modal.
Is this something that can be set up in Storyboard, or is it completely custom? How would you set this up?
Thank you in advanced for the help.
My guess is for Spotify it's custom as their implementation predates storyboards being... I'll use the term "friendly" to 3rd party developers.
However if you're building with the latest Xcode and iOS SDK this should be fairly easy to accomplish by building a container view controller wherein the child view would be everything in the upper quadrant, and you would effectively make that parent viewcontroller (with the now playing view area on the bottom) the root view controller.
As for the flicking / tapping, that's probably just a typical gesture recognizer that loads a modal. I can't recall if Apple's implementation is panning, but Spotify's is. My guess with them is as you as you tap down they load a new VC that's mostly obscured off screen and that's what actually gets panned in.
Is there a way to achieve the iTunes style modal view controller chain (see screenshot)?
I've looked around quite a bit but couldn't find any real questions about this. I'm not looking for a replacement or workaround, just want to know if it is possible to do with the current SDK (or iOS 5.0, although we are not supposed to talk about it a simple Yes/No would suffice).
For those who can not make it out from the image; iTunes on the iPad has this great feature where you can view a movie in a formsheet style modalviewcontroller, and if you click on another movie in that same modalviewcontroller it will create a new modalviewcontroller with the movie info you clicked on and will slide the 'old' one out (to the left). It will slide back in when the center modalviewcontroller is dismissed.
UPDATE:
I'm sure it has been done before, but I wrote my own implementation. It turned out not to be very difficult, although it misses some context-animations (like the flip from position), it is pretty usable. Since I wrote it for iOS 5, I will make the code public this fall when the NDA is lifted.
I suspect that it's a single modal view controller with a scrollview. The scroll view has a semitransparent background and displays several "pages". If you take that approach, I can't imagine it being too difficult to implement.
I'm trying to find a solution I've seen implemented in some iPad apps where what appears to be a UISplitViewController does not display the master view docked to the left in landscape orientation. Instead, the behavior is exactly the same in landscape as in portrait, with a UIBarButtonItem on the left side of a UIToolbar at the top of the screen bringing up a UIPopoverController with the master view controller's view. This presents some menu options that, when selected, appear to launch new UIViewController-derived classes into the detail view.
The app I'm working on needs to take advantage of as much screen real estate as possible and having the master view with the menu options docked to the left side doesn't add much value; it actually hinders the app.
So actually what I'm trying to do is two-fold:
Suppress the docked master view in landscape orientation
Have the selection of a row (menu option) in the master view load a new UIViewController-derived class into the detail view.
I've seen examples of each by themselves, respectively:
http://vimeo.com/13054813 (Hiding the Root View of a UISplitViewController)
http://bit.ly/aypcr0 (MultipleDetailViews code example from Apple)
However, I can't seem to get both of these working together.
The reason for using this approach is that I have multiple UIViewController-derived classes that I want to display when the appropriate menu option is selected. I could just instantiate them and add their views to the existing detail view and they would display fine. The problem is that none of the UIViewController lifecycle methods ever get called besides viewDidLoad (e.g. viewWillAppear:, viewDidUnload, etc.). This also includes orientation changes, and this is a big problem for the app. It seems that the only times a UIViewController-derived class acts like a UIViewController is when it is added as a subview of the app's UIWindow, or to a container class (like UINavigationController or UISplitViewController).
Am I going down the right path with the UISplitViewController, or is there a better solution?
Thanks for all of your help in advance!
Justin
This is a good UISplitViewController replacement that has the features you want (and more). It is a direct "drop in" replacement for the real UISplitViewConroller.
http://mattgemmell.com/2010/07/31/mgsplitviewcontroller-for-ipad