UIScrollView, pagingEnabled, scrolling inertia, and sub sections of the UIView width - objective-c

In my app I'm using a scrolling canvas composed of equally sized cells.
The number of rows is unlimited, but the number of columns is fixed to 13.
At anyone time, I have exactly 7 cells fitting the width of the view.
I wrote my own tiling UIScrollView and everything is fine and works fine except for one thing:
I want to enable "paging" on the cell boundary, not on the "page" boundary.
In other words I want the horizontal scrolling to move no more than "one cell at a time". This is a usability issue.
In a standard UIScrollView with pagingEnabled=YES, there is some inertia when moving from one page to the next, but then the page is defined as having the full width of the view. I want to define the notion of page as 1/7 of the view width, such that I get the same kind of inertia when moving the display from cells 1-7 to cells 2-8, to cells 3-9, etc...
How would I go about that?
I found this and this, but this a related but different problem.

"Try making your scrollview less than the size of the screen (width-wise), but uncheck the 'Clip Subviews' checkbox in IB."
More info here.

Related

Use Page Width when printing NSTableView instead of the view width

This seems like it should be simple...
I have a basic NSTableView in a window. The window is arbitrarily resizable (width + height). The tableview is pinned to the edges of the window and it has a single column that contains view-based table rows. The table rows have content pinned to the left and right edges of the cells, so as you resize the width of the window, you are effectively adjusting how much white space is in the middle of the cell.
I'm now trying to implement printing for this tableview. When I set up the NSPrintOperation, I'm passing my tableview subclass as the view to print. My desired result is this: I want the width of the tableview to be resized to the width of the page (regardless of how wide the window is right now on screen). I don't want to adjust the scaling factor (because that affects width + height) - I simply want the result to be as if I manually resized my window to exactly match the width of a printed page and then hit "print".
I've tried setting horizontalPagination to .fitPagination - but the problem there is that seems to apply a scaling factor to the width + height (which means if the window is currently "very wide", it makes the row height really small as it compensates for the width).
I've tried overriding adjustPageWidthNew:left:right:limit: in my tableview subclass - but that never gets called.
I suppose I could create a duplicate tableview and re-set it up exactly like the one I have on screen, but that feels like overkill when the view I want is already good to go - I just need to temporarily resize the width while I'm printing.
Any ideas?

tvOS tableView scroll smooth from cell to cell

In my tvOS-app I use a tableView with custom cells. If the cell is higher than the TV-screen it will show the "center-part" of the cell (top and bottom are not visible) and scrolling up or down will center the cell above or below. Is it possible and if, how, to change the "jumping" from cell to cell to a smooth scrolling like in iOS?
You should limit your cells to use a fixed height for a few lines of text and show focus. When a user selects one of the cells you can then expand / zoom / transition to show the whole text is a specific scrollable text view. This interface maintains the users understanding of content, lists and block text.
Just found the solution. Knowing what to search could be an advantage ;-)
Adding this simple line gives me the handling like in iOS:
self.tableView.panGestureRecognizer.allowedTouchTypes = #[#(UITouchTypeIndirect)];

How to autolayout in Xcode buttons filled with different sized images?

I am working on a project with multiple buttons on a viewcontroller and I used autolayout. I want all the buttons to have equal widths and heights and I have horizontal/vertical spacing like this:
The result on multiple devices is like this:
For the example I gave the buttons a background color, but in fact they will be filled with images of all kinds of sizes. I have image assets (#1x/#2x/#3x) for the buttons. For example, the #2x image assets will never be bigger then 100width and 75height (points).
Some of the button images can be changed by the user. So I want the button size to be ‘independent’ of the images inside. The buttons should NOT resize based on the image ‘inside’.
So I want to first(auto)layout the buttons, without the images ‘filling’ the buttons, so that the buttons will have the optimum size for the biggest sized images in my project (for the #2x image assets as mentioned:100width&75height points).
When I autolayout the buttons, and afterwards fill them with the images, xcode ‘wants’ to let me update the frames because of misplaced views. I do NOT want the images affecting the autolayout.
If I just run the app on the simulator or on a real iphone, it runs fine. But I have all these misplaced views warnings. What should I do? How will I 'tell' Xcode(7.1) that the images should NOT affect the width and heights of the buttons?
I have the feeling I have a slightly wrong approach to this (auto)layout problem, but I can not yet put my finger on it. I think I make some kind of logical error.
Is it good practice to first (auto)layout the buttons and then ‘fill’ with the images? Or should I fill the buttons with the images and then (auto)layout?
Here an example with images which are of equal widths and heights:
Regarding the earlier question about conflicting constraint:
So I want these buttons to have equal width and heights: ideally 100width and 75height in points. The width will be alright, but the heights is somewhat difficult when I am using autolayout for different sized viewcontrollers (with a scrollview on it). I want to use additional constraints that 'says'; the buttons should NOT have a height value lower then 75 points. If I use a fixed height constraint, with 'equal or higher then' 75 points I get a conflict with the equal heights constraints (off course). I guess I should work with priorities, but I tried, and I did NOT succeed yet with it.
How should I proceed?
Help is much appreciated!
Question 1:
Of course you're getting a conflict when setting two height constraints of which one computes to 1/3 of the screen width (≈ 107px excluding padding on the iPhone 4) and the other enforces a minimum height that is bigger than this value (e.g. 120px).
Fortunately there's a way out of this using priorities:
Set the fixed height constraint's priority to a value below the priority of your 'greater or equal' constraint. This way autolayout will choose the fixed height constraint only if its constant is greater or equal to the constant of your 'greater or equal' constraint. Otherwise the constant of your 'greater or equal' constraint will be used as the view's height. Makes sense, right? :)
Question 2:
You can achieve the desired behavior as described in your second question by enforcing a fixed height and width for your image view and setting its content mode to "Aspect Fit". In Interface Builder there's a drop down menu for that:
In your case the best way to give the image view fixed dimensions is to pin all four sides to its superview (because the superview has a well-defined size):
So when you apply these leading, trailing, top and bottom constraints to all your image views the images will automatically resized according to the constraints and the result will look like this:

Springs in Auto Layout: Distribute views evenly, with constraints, in Xcode 5

I understand the old Struts and Springs method of aligning, sizing and distributing views in Interface Builder. However, I cannot seem to figure out how to evenly distribute views using auto layout with Xcode 5. There was a way to do it using Xcode 4, but that option is gone.
I have 7 buttons arranged in a vertical stack. On a 3.5" layout, it looks great. When I preview the screen in the 4" layout, all of the buttons remain tightly packed and there is a large amount of space below the last button.
I want them to stay the same height, but I want the space between them to be able flex so they can spread out across the screen.
I've been able to get the height of the buttons to flex and fill the space, but that is not my desired behavior. I would like to learn how to use Auto Layout to replace my old Springs behavior, but I can't seem to find any way to do it through Interface Builder.
I'm ok with the top button either being a fixed space from the top edge or a proportional space from the top edge, likewise for the bottom button and the bottom edge. Those are less important to me, I'm good with either.
But I really need to figure out how to evenly distribute the extra space between each of the items in the view.
EDIT Note that in iOS 9 this technique will become unnecessary, because a UIStackView will perform distribution automatically. I'll add another answer explaining how that works.
How to Perform Even Distribution Using Autolayout
The simplest way to do this in Interface Builder alone (rather than constructing constraints in code) is to use "spacer" views:
Position the top and bottom buttons absolutely.
Place spacer views between all the buttons. Use constraints to position them horizontally (centering them horizontally is simplest) and to set their widths.
Make constraints between each button and the spacer view above and below it, with a Constant of 0.
Now select all the spacer views and set their heights to be equal.
The first screen shot shows me setting this up in IB:
I have deliberately not corrected for the "misplaced views" because I want you to see what it looks like while I'm designing the constraints. Here's the result on both a 4 inch and a 3.5 inch screen:
I have left the spacer views black, just to show you how this technique works, but of course in real life you would make them transparent and hence invisible! So the user sees just your buttons, evenly distributed on either height of screen.
The reason for the use of this technique is that although the notion of equality performs the distribution of values you are asking for, constraints can apply equality only between aspects of views; thus we need the extra views (the spacer views) so that we have things we can make equal to other things (here, the heights of the spacer views).
Other Approaches
Obviously, a more flexible approach is to assign the constraints in code. This may sound daunting, but there's a lot of third-party code out there to help you, such as this sort of thing.
For example, if we have a (possibly invisible) superview whose height acts as a boundary to dictate maximum vertical distribution of our four buttons, we can pin their tops to the vertical center of that superview with a constant of 0 but a multiplier of 0.000001, 0.666667, 1.33333, and 2.0 respectively (if we have four buttons); now the buttons will stay vertically distributed even as the superview changes size in response to screen height or whatever. [In Xcode 5.1, it will be possible to set that up in Interface Builder, but in earlier versions of Xcode it is not possible.]
In iOS 9 / Xcode 7 this problem will be trivially solved in IB. Simply select the buttons (or whatever it is you want to distribute vertically) and choose Editor > Embed In > Stack View. Then you simply configure the stack view:
Provide constraints that position and size the stack view itself. For example, pin the four edges of the stack view to the four edges of its superview.
Set the stack view's attributes. In this case we want Vertical axis, Fill alignment, Equal Spacing distribution.
That's all! However, you may be curious about how this works, because it is still possible to do the same thing manually in code. A stack view performs distribution, not by inserting spacer views, but by inserting spacer guides. A guide (a UILayoutGuide) is a lightweight object that behaves like a view for purposes of layout constraints, but is not a view and therefore doesn't have to be made invisible and doesn't carry any of the overhead of a view.
To illustrate, I'll do in code what the stack view is doing. Presume we have four views to distribute vertically. We assign them constraints for everything but their distribution:
They all have absolute height constraints
Their left is pinned to the superview's left, and their right is pinned to the superview's right
The top view's top is pinned to the superview's top, and the bottom view's bottom is pinned to the superview's bottom
Now, presume we have references to the four views as views, an array. Then:
let guides = [UILayoutGuide(), UILayoutGuide(), UILayoutGuide()]
for guide in guides {
self.view.addLayoutGuide(guide)
}
NSLayoutConstraint.activateConstraints([
// guide heights are equal
guides[1].heightAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[0].heightAnchor),
guides[2].heightAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[0].heightAnchor),
// guide widths are arbitrary, let's say 10
guides[0].widthAnchor.constraintEqualToConstant(10),
guides[1].widthAnchor.constraintEqualToConstant(10),
guides[2].widthAnchor.constraintEqualToConstant(10),
// guide left is arbitrary, let's say superview margin
guides[0].leftAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(self.view.leftAnchor),
guides[1].leftAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(self.view.leftAnchor),
guides[2].leftAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(self.view.leftAnchor),
// bottom of each view is top of following guide
views[0].bottomAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[0].topAnchor),
views[1].bottomAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[1].topAnchor),
views[2].bottomAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[2].topAnchor),
// top of each view is bottom of preceding guide
views[1].topAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[0].bottomAnchor),
views[2].topAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[1].bottomAnchor),
views[3].topAnchor.constraintEqualToAnchor(guides[2].bottomAnchor)
])
(Obviously I could make that code cuter and shorter using loops, but I have deliberately unrolled the loops for clarity, so that you can see the pattern and the technique.)

How does the Reeder Mac app animate lists when switching folders?

Initially I was under the impression that it uses the table row slideup/down animations while inserting/deleting new rows but I doubt if it's doing that as it does it so fluidly even with thousands of items in the list (otherwise it would take a lot of time for the deletions/insertions to work).
Am I right in my assumption that it's simply attaching a new instance of the News list at the bottom of the screen, shrinking the above one while the one at the bottom expands to fill up space?
UPDATE:
Please see this video of what I mean: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4960327/ReederAnim.mov
I can not tell you exactly how Silvio Rizzi made this, but as you see in the playback, a list view is added behind the shown list view, and the front list view fades out (.alpha = 0.0;) while the list view behind it expands its height per row.
When you desicate it frame by frame it becomes quite clear what he does, and it is really not that advanced. But I have to admit, with the white "milky" polished interface, it looks quite neat.
In addition, you can see that while animating, the background list view only renders the top 7 entries (hopefully calculated by dividing the view height with the average height of the cells shown) making the list view quick to load. Then afterwards, he can load an extended array of cells once you start scrolling, or in a background thread starting once the animation is complete.