I am building an AIR app which will be kind of like Dropbox. It will allow users to sync their files between various OSs. What I would like to know is that how can i change the default file system's file icons (add an overlay for eg) for states like - Synced and Syncing, the way Dropbox does it ??
On Windows i found out that Dropbox edits the registry files to insert the overlay icons..not yet sure how they do it in MAC OS X though.
I saw some threads here asking similar questions about AIR, but none referencing how to change file's icons. Hoping to get a solution for this from the various experts .. Please suggest any ideas if you know how it can be accomplished. Much thanks.
A simple yet effective solution would be to use icons that are only internal to your application : just embed in your application files some transparent pictures representing the various states of your files (with only the small part telling in which state it is, with the rest totally transparent), that you will add at runtime above the displayed icons.
Since you can get the actual icon of your files, just draw them into a BitmapData (if needed) & add an overlay with theses custom images, using the one related to your file's state in your application.
And one step further could be to store in your AIR application folder any resulting icons for future use (check what types of files you already have, and if your new file type isn't in thoses, export the various icons with your custom overlays to PNG files directly on the user device, for re-loading them the next time the application is opened).
Related
Is there any way to create and display music notation inside of a codenameone app?
For Java generally there are some libraries like for example JFugue that let you write music inside a program. Maybe also display it, i didn't try that out.
There is lilypond, which would work in a desktop environment if you were able to run it to make the pdf after generating the file itself.
I wrote a small app in Android Studio and had to write my own music notation logic and drew it with the help of png files on a Canvas. That worked okay for small musical examples of a clef and around 2-7 notes.
Now i want to do something similar in Codenameone and display at least a clef and some notes inside the app (maybe as an image) - they have to be generated with some random element while the program runs.
It would also be great to be able to write and show more than a few notes, displaying it somehow and maybe also with the ability to have it as a pdf file later.
Is it possible to use something that already exists?
Thanks a lot!
I'm supposed to develop a mobile app for moodle using android on titanium studio. And I have been searching for days for any helpful article on how to get a file chooser dialog to work on android. Most of the tutes offer image upload but I need to upload .pdf and zip files from mobile. I have already tried fileChooserDialog() and folderChooseDialog() to no avail. Help please?
There isn't a file chooser out of the box, as apps usually send files to each other internally. You can roll your own using ListViews though easily..
Build a list of all the files you're interested in. (https://docs.appcelerator.com/platform/latest/#!/api/Titanium.Filesystem.File-method-getDirectoryListing)
Loop through the list omitting any file types you don't want and build the list
When the user selects a file capture the click event and upload that file.
Style however you want..
I am creating a Mac App, using NSDocument, that stores a custom class of documents to iCloud.
I was able to get the program to store documents to iCloud quite easily by just Code Signing it, Sandboxing it, and adding iCloud entitlements; however, I'm still encountering a problem where when I trigger an iCloud conflict and the program drops down the sheet allowing the user to resolve the conflict the rows in the sheet do not show the small image of the document (like Preview and TextEdit do).
Additionally, when I click on the area where the image should be (it's blank) it opens up a Quick Look window that just displays an image of the Document Icon together with some other information as opposed to a snap shot of the actual file like Preview and TextEdit do.
I have not found any information in Apple's documentation that explains what I need to do to implement the same behaviour as Preview and TextEdit.
So far I've been surprised by how easily I've been able to get all of the functionability of not only the Auto Saves and the Versions browser, but also saving to the Cloud. NSDocument seems to do all of this for the developer (resolving iCloud Conflicts, etc.), as Apple's documents says it does, but again I'm not getting this other behaviour and I don't want to reinvent the wheel by writing code that is not needed.
I'm thinking that the answer might lie somewhere with implementing a Quick Look thumbnail (for the small image in the table in the sheet) and a Quick Look preview for the larger preview of the document when that in the sheet is clicked on, but this seems like a lot of work and I'm afraid of losing some of the other build-in functions of NSDocument if I start "trapping" NSDocument routines up the food chain so to speak.
Has anyone else encountered this problem and found the easiest solution?
Update: Dec. 25/12
I've finally figured out that the problem is I need a QuickLook generator to display both a QL Thumbnail (which shows up in the table in the conflicts sheet) and a QL Preview (which is displayed when a user clicks on the Thumbnail)
I ended up creating the QL generator project, and afterwards creating a workspace which I added my main project and the QL generator project to. After that I added a Copy Files Build Phase to the main project to copy the QL generator into the main Application bundle.
This is the email:
Dear developer,
We have discovered one or more issues with your recent binary submission for "Bla". Before your app can be reviewed, the following issues must be corrected:
Corrupt Icon File - The icon file 72 x 72.png appears to be corrupt.
Once these issues have been corrected , go to the Version Details page and click Ready to Upload Binary. Continue through the submission process until the app status is Waiting for Upload and then use Application Loader to upload the corrected binary.
I have change the file and re-upload the app, but I got the email again.
As Michael Dautermanm says.
Make sure "compress png's" is turned off in the build settings.
thanks
Can you open the file in Preview, and choose 'Tools' -> 'Show Inspector'? The file may be using some PNG format features that Apple don't like. They want RGB, 8 bit depth, no alpha. See the Custom Icon and Image Creation Guidelines.
For comparison, here are screenshots of the Preview Inspector, showing properties of an icon for an app that was accepted. If you're unsure, post similar screenshots for the properties of your picture.
The "Pixels Per Meter" part may or may not appear. It wasn't there when I first opened some icon files five minutes ago, and now it appears for every PNG I open. Weird.
Edit: also check the icon entries in your 'Info.plist', or the 'Info' tab for your Target. (These are not the same thing, as I just spent several hours discovering. Settings in the 'Info' tab override your 'Info.plist'.) As of the iOS 5.1 SDK, these include Icon file (a string), Icon files (an array), and Icon files (iOS 5) (a dictionary containing at least one dictionary containing an array). XCode seems to add your launch images to this list too. Don't rely on it to keep the list tidy - I have sometimes found outdated filenames in mine.
For further comparison, here's what ended up in the Info.plist of a valid app. Your filenames may be different, as long as they match the resources in your project.
I'm the developer of the app Pillboxie. I have been having the same issue as you, but I believe I may have finally found a solution.
Before proceeding with my suggestion, make sure that your Info.plist and all icon filenames appear exactly as Apple requires. Keep checking the documentation to make sure you're up-to-date, but Dondragmer's recommendation looks correct to me.
I created all my image resources, including app icons, in Photoshop, exporting for web as PNG-24's. Because Pillboxie has numerous images, setting "Compress png's" to YES in the build settings helps me save several megabytes of space. I was getting the same error as you until I tried turning off this compression, as Evaristoyok suggests. However, my app jumped up several mb. I hoped to find a better way.
Tonight I found the following link: article. In it the author suggests to make sure that "Interlaced" is NOT selected in Photoshop when exporting images in the Save For Web & Devices dialog window. I re-exported all icon and launch images with this disabled, and it solved my issue. I was able to submit my app and still leave png compression enabled.
I'd like to make my app to open a specified PDF by an external app of the user's choice on the iPad. How can I do that? Or, is there any open-source PDF reader framework available so that I can put it into my app?
My situation in more detail:
I'm thinking of porting to the iPad from OS X / rewriting from scratch for the iPad an app which manages lots of PDFs (journal articles, etc.), but I don't want to write the PDF reader part, because there are many good ones already out there; I don't want to reinvent the wheels.
(You might say you shouldn't reinvent pdf management apps, but I'd like to make one as a front end to SPIRES, and there isn't one so far.)
As the app would be a front end to a serious reading activity, UIWebView's pdf capability is not enough.
Also, users of my app would have various preferences which app to use.
That's the background behind my question. Thanks in advance!
Here's my self-answer:
Use UIDocumentInteractionController. See this Apple doc.
The problem now is to find a way to choose programmatically exactly with which app you open a document, when multiple apps are available to a same file type.
Its not that hard to view PDFs without a UIWebView. You use some Quarts 2D drawing but a large majority of the work is done for you. You mainly have to choose how you will flip pages, and do pinch to zoom.
Quarts 2D PDF reference
You aren't able to search inside of PDF files. You can't access the text. You could do annotation, but it would be a hack at best.