I am creating a grid of icons in Objective C / Xcode.
Is there anyway to re-create the iPad Home screen, the one filled with a grid of icons for each App you have on your iPad.
What I am most interested in is reproducing the effect on the icons when the device is rotated. On rotation, a new grid icons (which matches the new orientation) swings around to the right orientation, and the icons themselves transform (I'm guessing its an alpha fade from one icon to the other) into the new icon that would appear at that position.
Ive looked at this SO question, and also at this blog. But I am wondering if there is a class (hopefully one developed by Apple, but third party solutions will do) which recreates this effect?
If there isn't such a class, can anyone suggest to me how I would do the icon transformation effect whilst the screen is swinging around to the correct orientation?
iOS 6 offers a class called UICollectionView that handles the creation of these grids for you. The API is fairly similar to that of UITableView and allows you lots of control for customization.
Check out the UICollectionView class reference, as well as this introductory tutorial.
Related
Using Xcode it is easy to get create a skeleton app for OS X. However, Apple's skeleton code is rather old style with a single view and menu bar. I am looking for skeleton code / best practices which create an app that has the basic pieces such as left navigation panel, toolbar, right panel with format inspector and middle work area. I.e., the new UI style apple deploys with their keynote, pages and numbers.
I have searched but not found a comprehensive example that shows the major components and how these are linked/interacting. I don't see it in the Apple developer area either. I'd rather bootstrap my Mac OS X UI programming skills by learning from others than wading through new territory by myself.
Either Objective-C or Swift would be fine. I am targeting Yosemite.
There's not an Xcode template for this.
You just add an NSToolBar in IB
SUper easy.
Then the details of the rest can vary tremendously.
But, it can easily be a 3 pane NSSplitview with view controllers managing each pane's views.
A navigation pane could easily be an NSTableView or outline view. Or it could be NSCollectionView.
An inspector could be a conglomerate of view controllers swapped in based on context or interaction.
Take a look at github and cocoacontrols.com to find some ideas.
The center pane would most likely be at a minimum an NSScrollView with a custom document view.
I have a post on SO detailing an NSClipView subclass that handles centering right when zoomed out or when the document is smaller.
One of the more impressive iOS app that I've come across is Jetsetter's due to its great design, incredible interface, and creative uses of animation. One of my favorite components of the app is the teaser photo interface they have for the hotels/venues. They provide a minimized photo slideshow, but if you want the full view you can click it and it expands to expose a larger version of the image. You can see a blurry video of this in action here.
I'm interested in recreating something similar. I'm well aware of the paged galleries like MHPagingScrollview (which is how the larger photo viewer functions), yet what I'm trying to figure out is the proper way to handle the transition. I've also seen libraries that handle the Ken Burns effect for images. However what is not clear is whether or not there are separate view controllers.
Is this a transition between two separate view controllers? Or would the minimized and maximized photo viewer be part of the same controller? How would you most efficiently replicate something similar? I've embedded a screen shot below to illustrate the before and after. The video linked above however most effectively illustrates this transition.
Mobile engineer from Jetsetter here. They are two separate controllers, but the transition animation occurs in the first. Here's the flow:
A user taps the smaller photo.
A transition view containing the full size image is placed directly on top of the smaller image.
The transition view animates to the bounds of the screen.
The photo viewer controller is presented as a modal without animation, completing the effect in one seamless animation.
The effect is reversed when the modal controller is dismissed.
The trick lies in your transition view. We created a UIView subclass (with clipsToBounds enabled) that contains an imageView. The bounds of the transition view expands to reveal the imageView, resulting in no distortion of the final image during the animation.
I designed a web app for iPhone and am now trying my hands at a native Objective-C version, and I'd like to retain some continuity with my original design. Since my web version uses CSS, I was able to customize the color palette, even though the UI was designed to imitate a native iPhone UI. I'd like to use a similar color scheme for my native app, but it doesn't seem so easy out of the box. I've gone through a couple tutorials and played around a bit with Interface Builder, inspecting the individual settings available for each control. My biggest questions are:
Is it possible to (or how do I) change the color of a Round Rect Button?
Is it possible to (or how do I) change the color of cells in a Table View?
Where in the Cocoa Touch Library can I find the standard iOS UI buttons, e.g. the green "Call Back" and red "Delete" buttons in the native voice mail?
Thanks
Nope, I don't think so. And you probably shouldn't anyways. In my opinion it's better to rather stay consistent with the OS and not the web... What you can do is to use a custom image.
UITableViewCell has a property named backgroundView, which is only present if you have a grouped style. This view has -- just like every other view -- a background color. If you don't have this and want to color individual cells, build a custom cell where you put in a view as background view.
As far as I know, they are not publicly available. However, you may find a lot of template images etc on the web that you can use.
I want to create a full Screen Cocoa application, however my app is slightly different from a conventional fullscreen app.
This app would be below everything else, so underneath the menu bar and the Dock, etc. It would have a large image covering up the Desktop and icons, with a custom NSView in the middle with a table view, etc. If this concept is hard to understand then here is an image:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/6308/mockupo.png
The only part that might be a bit confusing is the background image. This background image is NOT the wallpaper of the computer, but part of the app. So when the app is launched, it goes into full screen mode and puts itself underneath the dock and the menu bar, and underneath all other windows too. So it draws the background image to cover the screen (including Desktop and icons). Then has a custom NSView in the middle containing my controls.
What's the best way to go about doing this?
Thanks
Make a borderless window, the size of the menu-bar screen (screen 0—not [NSScreen mainScreen]), positioned at 0,0, with window level kCGDesktopWindowLevel.
Remember that you will need to observe for screen frame-change notifications (when the user changes the screen dimensions), and that you should correctly handle the case of no screen at all (headless Mac).
I think #Peter Hosey’s solution should work, but to make other windows go on top, you will probably need to change the window level to something else.
But, I implore you, do not do this. This will be the most bugly application the Macintosh has ever seen. There are a lot of really good user interface paradigms that you can use, and "replicating" the main desktop interface of Mac OS X is generally not one of them. That is, unless you are reimplementing Time Machine or something like that.
I am trying to design a feature in my application for the iPhone that simulates the Springboard feature (Main menu of the iPhone that allows you to view more apps), or the way Weather application works that allows you to flip between views.
Does anyone have any samples of this how I would go about doing this. It's seems very trivial but I am wondering if I am missing something that is already available either as an Apple example or someone who did a tutorial on this.
The image below show how the user would use it.
alt text http://www.agilitesoftware.com/SpringboardExample.png
As they slide their finger to the right (or left) the other image would begin to show up. And it would animate smoothly. The faster you swiped your finger the faster it would move to the next view.
Update: The other feature is that it should mimic the same feel when you slide your hand across the display that is snaps to the current view into place. It should not keep sliding across if there is more than 1 view to the direction you swiping your finger.
I've seen other applications use this so that is why I am asking.
This is accomplished using the UIScrollView with the pagingEnabled property set to true. Just add each of your views, adjust the contentSize, and it will automatically "page" to the width of the screen across the content.
There is a sample app (with code) with exactly this functionality on the iPhone developer site on Apple.com (I believe it's called "PageControl".) - I'd suggest checking it out.
d.
I'm writing an app that uses a similar UI. As NilObject recommended, we're using a UIScrollView with pagingEnabled=YES.
You may also be interested in this example code involving just two child views. I'm trying it out now; it's an interesting technique but I've had to write some additional special-casing code for some odd situations that resulted.
There's also another question on this site that asks about creating a grid of icons like the home screen.
I would check out Joe Hewitt's code from the Three20 project for this. It provides a nice interface and further refinement of the UIScrollView implemented as TTScrollView and TTScrollViewDelegate, TTScrollViewDataSource.