How to program draggable tiles for a word game? - ios

Question

I am an iOS programming newbie (reading several books on the subject simultaneously) and I would like to develop a (yet another) word game.
Coming from Flash/Flex programming background I was first expecting the tiles to be best bundled as gif or png assets.
But then I have taken a look (by using iFunbox) at the popular word games (Lexulous, Wordament, Words with Friends, Ruzzle, ...) and none of them is doing that:
That is none of the many apps I've looked at includes any letter pieces as images.
So my question is what would be the recommended approach (in Xcode 5 and with no additional SDKs like Cocos2d or Sparrow) to create a letter tile for a word game?
On a tile I'd like to have
the center-aligned letter (obviously!),
then an index in a corner displaying the letter value
and then another index for a total word value
When touched I'd like to make the tile a bit larger and add a shadow underneath it.
Should my tile class be a UIView (can they be dragged around, grow and have shadows?)
Should I use a .nib file for the tile?
For dragging I have found a good suggestions already: Dragging an UIView inside UIScrollView
But what I really would like to know here is: if UIView would make a good tile (performance- and feature-wise) or should I go for another base class (like maybe some shapes)?

Answer 1

Yes UIView would be a good container.
Create a subclass of UIView, say TileView, put in some labels, image view and a button over it, override buttons UIControlEventTouchDown, UIControlEventTouchUpInside, UIControlEventTouchDragInside events to help U navigate the view in its parent. Put the TileView in some container (your view controller view or where U would like it to be) and this is basically it.
-(void)btnPressed:(id)sender withEvent:(UIEvent *) event
{
CGPoint point = [[[event allTouches] anyObject] locationInView:self.view];
dx = 0;
dy = 0;
oldPoint = point;
}
-(void)btnRelesed:(id)sender
{
// stop moving code
}
-(void)btnDragged:(id)sender withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
CGPoint point = [[[event allTouches] anyObject] locationInView:self.view];
dx = point.x - oldPoint.x;
dy = point.y - oldPoint.y;
oldPoint = point;
// set tile view center position using
CGPoint ptCenter;
ptCenter = self.view.center;
ptCenter.x = ptCenter.x + dx;
ptCenter.y = ptCenter.y + dy;
self.view.center = ptCenter;
}
self.view is your TileView and its self.view cause U have ovrriden UIView class ;)