How to make UILabel a child of another UILabel in Interface Builder? - ios

I need to make a half of a sentence red and the other half blue, so I placed two different UILabels in Interface Builder and changed their colors accordingly using the GUI. On the Objective-C side, sometimes I need to hide and reveal the sentence.
self.redHalf.hidden = YES;
self.blueHalf.hidden = YES;
self.redHalf.hidden = NO;
self.blueHalf.hidden = NO;
This is not modular code. I'd rather just make one call to hide or reveal the whole sentence. So I tried to make one half the child of the other half by dragging one atop the other in Interface Builder, but nothing happened.

You cannot make subviews in a UILabel in IB. (You can do it in code though.)
Just drag out a generic UIView in IB and make both UILabels subviews of the generic UIView. Then set the generic UIView's hidden property to hide or show both labels.

Related

How to make a popup window with an image SWIFT

I was wondering how to make a popup window similar to this example:
The origin window is full of buttons that when is selected will then pull up the image I desire to use.
I would simply create a reusable UIView component and everything you need as a subview, such as a UIImageView for your image, a UILabel or a UIButton in the top right. Here is the process to show it:
Create a UIView that takes up the full screen, make it black, and maybe 0.5 alpha.
Create another UIView which is your primary pop-up view, make it slightly smaller than the previous view, but make sure both of these views are subviews of the parent subview.
Add the desired elements on to the pop-up view as subviews, I would even suggest creating a UIView subclass if you plan to use this a lot.
To present the pop-up, make sure both views are set to hidden = true when created and so that when a button is selected, you can set them to hidden = false
If you would like them to be animated, simply start them off with alpha = 0.0 and use something like UIView's animateWithDuration and set the pop-up view to alpha = 1.0
There is a lot of little details you can change to cater to your needs, but this is the basic structure on how to accomplish your goal.
Check out UIView animation methods here.

Which view controller should I be using?

I am trying to implement a mockup like this. However, I'm not sure which view controller I should be using for something like this? I tried UICollectionViewController but that puts cells of fixed width on each row. As you can see in my mockup, at some places I have a label taking all width and in other places I have three labels taking up the width.
You can use the simple UIViewController and drag the labels manually in the Storyboard. In order to make the rectangular label to round edged labels, you can create a IBOutletCollection of all those labels and iterate through the array, get each label's layer and set the corner radius to appropriate value.
e.g:
#property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutletCollection(UILabel) NSArray *customLabels;
As customLabels is an NSArray so it doesn't have a layer property. You can do it like this:
for (UILabel *label in customLabels) {
label.layer.cornerRadius = 5.0;
}
I'd stick with a plain UIViewController based controller.
The collection view is more for dynamic content like a bunch of photos. To do this with a collection view would take a bunch of unnecessary work.
With this layout, just lay the objects out manually on the storyboard and then you can just use the regular constraints if you need to resize dynamically and that will do just fine.
You can just use a UIViewController and set the buttons up appropriately in Interface Builder or programmatically.
If you take the latter approach, you can do something like this in your view controller
UIButton *button = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeRoundedRect];
// be sure to do this step or you won't see your button
button.frame = CGRectMake(...);
// Customize your button here
[self.view addSubview:button
See this documentation for information on CGRectMake if you aren't familiar
Edit: I'm not sure if this approach will handle orientation changes appropriately. I suspect it would if you calculate the frame instead of hardcoding values. I don't have the ability to test that right now unfortunately.
Edit again: I didn't realize this was tagged for RubyMotion. I'm not familiar with that api so my code example may not be relevant.

Using interface builder to layout a scrolling view with images and text

I have a requirement in my app to display a bunch of information that includes both text and images. It will be quite long, so it will need to be scrollable to access all the content.
I know that I can achive this by programmatically adding different UILabels, UIImages etc to a UIScrollView. But this is a proof of concept, so I'm looking for something a little quicker than having to work out all the positioning and code required. The information is static anyway, and does not need to interact with code.
Is there a way to do this using the interface builder (storyboard or xib is fine)?
you definitely can do that if you simply want a quick interface
1.> you might need to know how long is your scroll view, for example in my case, i set it to 1568
2.> Then i drag all the controls that will fit for the first 568 pixel view onto the scroll view and position them.
3.> Then change the Y value for that scroll view to something like - 500, so you can see the rest of the scroll view, and put everything you need there.
4.> After you have all your controls, and remember to set the frame back to 0,0,320,568
5.> last step, in your code, set SCROLLVIEW.contentSize = CGSizeMake(320, 1568);
I would still suggestion don't hard code all those values, but if you are looking for a quick way to do your interface, hope that gives you some ideas.
Just start a new project with a single view, it will come with a xib or storyboard for its single ViewController.
Create a UIView by dragging it into the workspace and place as many Labels, Images and UI Elements as you want.
Open the xib / storyboard and drag a UIScrollView in as your root VC's root view. Drag the view containing your layout into the scrollview, making it the scrollviews only subview.
Done (almost)!
If you launch your app at this point, you'll notice you can't scroll. That is because the scrollview is "too stupid" to adjust the size of its contentSize property on its own.
You'll need some code here, but it is only a tiny snippet and you won't need to touch it again:
Create a new Category on UIScrollView.
In your category's implementation, do:
#implementation UIScrollView (MyHandyCategory)
-(void)awakeFromNib {
NSArray *subViews = [self subviews];
UIView *contentView = [subViews objectAtIndex:0];
[self setContentSize:contentView.frame.size];
}
#end
Done (for real this time)! This will check the size of the view your scrollview contains and ajust the contentSize after it has been initialized. You can change the size of your content view as you like, no need to play around with hardcoded values or even Interface Builder values!
If it’s just proof of concept I’d have a WebView and a local HTML page you load. Easy-peasy.
I would suggest UICollectionView. It's fairly straightforward. There's a good tutorial here:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/22324/beginning-uicollectionview-in-ios-6-part-12

Making an element an element display on top of the UIView border

I am trying to place a UIButton inbetween my popup view and the parent view.
I cant successfully do that by doing that [self.view addSubview:new];. My problem there is the border UIView can be seen across the UIButton .
I've tried [self.view.superview addSubview:new]; thinking that that would make it go away but it doesnt it still shows there.
I need to find a way to successfully place that button on top of everything (UIView border in this case).
I know I could do that if I insert the button from the parentView, but I want to handle all my subViews buttons within each subView, otherwise it everything will become messy very quickly.
Is there a way to do what I am trying to achieve?
According to Apple's CALayer documentation, borders always appear above subviews because they're drawn on another layer. The best solution is to create a background view to fake the border.
So instead, your popup view would have an orange background. It'd have another, slightly smaller subview directly over it with a white background, and then your button.
See this post for the implementation.

What do these settings do in Interface Builder?

This is for a UIButton specifically. I understand that the alignment options pertain to the label inside the UIButton, but what does the 'content' settings do? They seem like they correspond to the setEnabled:, setSelected:, setHighlighted: methods of the UIButton class, however clicking Highlighted or Selected doesn't seem to change the button's behavior outside of interface builder. Also, what would be the use-case for having a button always show highlighted or selected?
There are several practical uses for these methods. As #MHUMobileInc. pointed out, it can be used for a game like Minesweeper. It can also allow you to use the button as a sort of switch, where the selected button has "ON" and the non-selected version has "OFF". It seems that Apple wants developers to shy away from this, and to use either UISwitches or a custom view. However, Apple does contradict itself in some of its apps.
These settings set the initial state of the UIButton- so if in your viewDidLoad you set it not selected nor highlighted, this Interface Builder setting will not be seen on screen when you run the app. If you want to ensure that these settings are kept, it might be easier to say so in code (viewDidLoad) rather than Interface Builder.
It may be easier not to use these settings too much. They can lead to confusion for you (the developer), other programmers who are working on the project (if any) and the user. Use the built-in UIKit views when it works and create your own subclasses when there is nothing that fits best for the situation.
The upper portion addresses the alignment of the content within the view. For example, if you have a large UIButton with an image that's smaller than the bounds of the button, by default the image will be centered vertically and horizontally inside the button. However, if you want the image to hug the left/right/top/bottom, you can set the alignment using those options.
All of these controls pertain to the UIControl, not UIButton, as indicated by the header in that screenshot.
Alignment refers to contentHorizontalAlignment and contentVerticalAlignment. Many controls return a fixed width or fixed height, or both, from sizeThatFits:. For example a UISwitch object has a fixed size, whereas a UISlider object has a fixed height. If you assign a frame to a control object that does not correspond to these fixed dimensions, these properties determine where in that frame the control interface should be drawn. Instances of UIButton do fill their frame, so the UIButton class interprets these properties differently to apply to the button's content, but the properties themselves are not specific to the UIButton class.
Similarly the selected, highlighted and enabled properties are defined by UIControl not UIButton, not all subclasses of UIControl utilise them.

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