How can I do this "grouping" animation like Apple mail or the Gmail iPad app?
Does this need to be hard coded, and completely done with the animation framework, or does Apple expose an API for this to be done. I checked the developer docs, and I don't see anything like this. But Gmail was able to exactly replicate Apple's animation, and that's why I am curious to know if it can be done in an easier way.
I am 95% sure Apple does not have a UIStackOfPaperViewController or anything like that. You would have to code this up yourself.
Conceptually, it isn't too complicated: a background view with a texture, and each subview tilted at a random angle and a drop shadow beneath. You could do the drop shadow by drawing a gradient in a view around the "real" view. Core Animation's default behaviors would probably do the right thing, e.g. if you create the page view off screen and then set the final location, it will fly onto the stack pretty much how you would like it.
If you don't need support for releases earlier than iOS 6, there's probably good stuff in the Collection View Controller to make this easier.
Hopefully that's enough information to get you started, but your question is really broad. It's difficult to answer "How do I do X?" if you don't specify your starting point, or answer "How can I do this in an easier way?" if you don't specify what you think the hard way is first.
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The new facebook app has a new feature. There is a little circle in the bottom of a message that means where is the user in the conversation. (hist last seen message).
It is pretty awesome, but i couldn´t figure out how it was developed. I´m pretty sure they created a new cell type, to show where is each user in the conversation. And then, if the user reads it, it just update the table and the user will be in another message that he just read. This would be ok.
But my question is, during this transition, the little circle is animated from the current message to the new position, and the others little circle are animated to make space for the new coming little circle. How is that possible? To animate something on top of a listview?
Thanks in regards,
Can you give me a screenshot of what you're talking about so I can look at it, or give steps to get to the screen you're talking about?
Facebook does some pretty remarkable stuff with iOS. If you want to see some of the crazier things, check out the app Paper that was developed using the Pop Framework. In there you might find some of the UI actions you're looking for.
I am looking to implement a custom toolbar that sits above my keyboard for a text field with some custom values. I've found a ton of tutorials online but this question is for asking what's the best way to do this.
This tutorial here http://blog.carbonfive.com/2012/03/12/customizing-the-ios-keyboard/ provides the most common way I can see across many tutorials, with creating a new subclass of UIView and using delegates to get that information across.
That's the commonality. However, I came across this tutorial which in the view controller itself just creates the toolbar, assigns it to the textField inputAccessory and it's good to go. In fact, I tried out the code and without any effort, I have now a custom keyboard.
http://easyplace.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/adding-custom-buttons-to-ios-keyboard/
This just seems a bit too easy to me though and I'd think the proper, Apple recommended way would be to create that UIView subclass and use delegates so that the view controller with the text fields acts as that delegate.
I'm specifically targeting iOS 7 in my app.
What are people's thoughts on this? If the second easier link is supported and is likely to pass Apple's guidelines, it's a good starting point but if delegates are the way to go, I'd rather look into that from the start.
Your thoughts will be appreciated.
There is no 'Apple Approved' way to do this, and its hard to believe anything you do here would get your app rejected. The custom keyboard you reference in your post has the iOS6 look and will appear outdated in an iOS6 app. I'll mention some iOS7 suggestions shortly, but the constant danger of mimicking what the System looks like today is guaranteed to look outdated later. In Mac/Cocoa development, Apple use to say at the WWDC that if you did something custom, make it look custom, don't take a standard Apple widget and try to duplicate it. But that advice is mostly ignored.
For iOS 7, you can create buttons that appear just like the system ones do (not pressed), but of course when someone presses them, they won't act like system buttons (i.e. animate up and "balloon" out.
I'm currently using a fantastic add-on keyboard, my fork of KOKeyboard (which uses the buttons above). This is such a cool addition. While the buttons look like iPad buttons, each one has 5 keys in it. By dragging to a corner you select one of the four, and tapping in the middle gives you that key. This might be overkill for your app, but it really helped me with mine. It looks like this:
(the Key / Value is in the under laying view.) The center control lets you move the cursor - its like a joy stick - and can be used to both move and select text. Amazing class, I wish I'd invented it!
Also, for any solution, you want to use a UIToolbar as the view holding the keys, for the reason that it supports blur of the view it overlays, just like the keyboard does. You can use the UIToolbar with no bar button items in it (if you want), and just add subviews. This is a "trick" I learned here, as there is no other way to get blur!
David's KOKeyboard (er…, the one he used - see David's comment below) looks nice. I suspect that he is using the official Apple mechanism:
inputAccessoryView
Typically, you'd set that value on a UITextView, but it can be any class that allows itself to become the first responder.
The provided view will be placed above the default apple keyboard.
It is correct that there is no official mechanism (and it is suggested against) to modify any system provided keyboard. You can add to it, as above. You can also entirely replace it for with your own mechanism. Apply will forgo the keyboard setting on your view and use a custom input mechanism if you set
inputView
set it to any view - Apple will still manage its appearance and dismissal as it does the custom keyboards.
Edit: Of course, iOS 8.x added significant access to keyboards. (not mentioned here)
My question here is not about how to achieve something, but what all to include that would have the best effect for the content I am presenting.
I am designing an app (probably with single screen) which is story based. Not a story, but a scenario, to say. A typical scenario is driving through the street, going to office or both in one. And so on.
Upon each tap (or any user activity), next step of the scenario will reveal itself. Like meeting a person, colliding with a car and so on. But since these scenarios are virtually infinite, it is not possible to design graphics for my app. To say in other words, it won't be an office, an attic, a castle or a house. It can be any of that, or a combination of them.
Due to this limitation, and partially my laziness to deal with a lot of graphics (I don't have a subordinate, nor big bucks!), I have decided to do some simple animation upon each tap. A single object (like a ball) can roll or emerge from nowhere etc.
My questions:
1) Optional: How do I achieve this animation? I know objective c but I do not know if it suffice. Box2d is other option that I know of. Is it ok or an overkill? If objective c suffices, can anyone help me with simple code that will animate a rolling ball from far (center of the iphone)?
2) Required: Above is something I can figure out by myself, but this is more important: How do I devise my other UI to describe the scene and situation? What all iOS features would fit the best in situation? I can think of single UILabel to describe situation, but I do not know how I can position/animate it along with 1 above. Again, this seems far too simplistic however. Are there other iOS views that could help me?
Sorry for somewhat ambiguous requirement, but I am facing lack of imagination here, and I know if I am misled at this step, a lot of things can go wrong.
Thank you for your assistance.
When using the Ti.UI.iPad.SplitWindow what is the best(cleanest looking) way to update the detailView?
The options I can think of are changing the positions of elements in the detailView event or to show()/hide() vs open()/close() on an orientationchange event. I know that using the native UI components on the iPad should dynamically update to the layout width/height of the iPad but in my case the content on each detailView will have it's child objects positions updated on orientationchange. I'm just trying to get the smoothest from your all experiences. Even if I have to build custom animations I just want to start this correct from the beginning so no current code exists yet. Thus none included.
I'm hoping this isn't a duplicate as I searched before I ask but there are no Titanium based questions on this topic I can find. Possible but still different to what I'm asking.
The smoothest experience will be delivered by changing the least. I don't know what animations you are envisioning, but I would nudge you towards keeping it simple.
Here's a quick example of an orientation change in an iPad app I built recently. I had a bunch of images in a view with layout: 'horizontal'. Due to a nice bug, the images wrapped automatically. When the user reoriented the device, I animated the width of the view, and the images automatically and animatedly resorted themselves.
I've also had some clients at a large corporation get their hearts set on really complicated changes to the layout whenever the user reoriented the device. This resulted in a really unsatisfactory app that took 10-20 seconds to reorient. We made a lot of optimizations, and a lot of improvements in both their code and the underlying framework, but the heart of the problem was the complex design.
Take the time to consider if you really need complicated changes every time the user reorients, and how much benefit you are offering to your users. Also consider the cost to the user (not just to the device) of presenting them with a new UI.
Past that, you're probably not going to get too many answers until you put some experimentation in to this. If you come back with some code and some questions to go along with it, I can reformulate my answer to better pinpoint your situation.
Hope this helps! -Dawson
New to iOS, coming from the Java / Swing world, where I'm used to creating UIs programmatically, letting components size themselves and using various clever layout managers to arrange things.
It already seems clear that the iOS way is to make heavy use of Interface Builder, with a lot of fixed sizing and positioning. I'm not sure IB is ever going to come naturally, but I guess fixed layouts make sense given that you're working with limited space and a fixed window size.
It still seems like I'm writing a lot of boilerplate, though, and violating DRY, and so on.
Can somebody point me to a good primer on laying out iOS UIs, particularly programmatic UIs?
You don't really need to use IB to write MonoTouch apps. I almost never do. The CocoaTouch API is fairly simple and straightforward to develop on.
I haven't really found any writeup on UI development other than the apple documentation (which is really good, by the way, worthy reading), so here goes a couple of tips, based on my experience:
Inheritance is key to maintaining the code clean. You can inherit from basically any class in the API, like buttons, controllers, views, etc. Inherit and add your customizations in those classes. Don't shove everything in the AppDelegate like many examples show. You'll thank me later on.
Have I mentioned inheritance already?
The one thing iOS doesn't have is a layout manager, so if you're used to Java like you mentioned, this will sound a little strange. Different from what Java people think, this is not a big deal. UITableViews help tremendously with this (vide next point).
A lot of iphone apps are built on top of the UITableViewController, even apps that don't look like tables. It's a great framework to do anything related to scrolling. Learn to use it well. Almost anything that scrolls vertically is a UITVC. Follow the guidelines that define when you create and when you dispose cells and objects.
Be careful every time you add a Frame location in your control. Instead of setting hardcoded values, try using offsets from other locations (x+40, for example) whenever possible.
Make sure you add your views to the proper container as necessary. For example, if you're adding a global "Loading" view, add it to the Window object, while if you're adding a image on the left side of a table cell, use the ContentView. iOS changes those special views automatically all the time (resizing screen to fit "on call" bar at top, or rotating phone).
Miguel de Icaza has created a great framework for managing forms and tables, called MonoTouch Dialog. Take a look, and enjoy.