I'm looking for a simple solution to presenting popup text in an iOS app that contains text with hyperlinks.
At the moment, my text pops up as a UIAlertView. The user has a 'Close' button below which dismisses the box. However, this class (UIAlertView) doesn't allow the use of hyperlinks within the message text. I understand that creating a whole new custom UIAlertView is frowned upon (not to mention probably overkill for what I want to achieve).
Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree by using UIAlertViews. I'm new to iOS and don't know the scope of what's available. Essentially, I need a dialog (or window) to pop up, containing a string of text, a (close/back/dismiss) button, and possible hyperlinks within the text. Those hyperlinks in turn launch other popups/windows/dialogs of their own.
What I'm working on here is a simple dictionary application. It's a table view containing terms. The terms lead to definitions, and in most cases, the definitions themselves reference other terms. Fairly simple, and if possible I'd like to use standard API classes.
Any wisdom would be appreciated. If I truly have to go down the route of creating my own custom UIAlertView class, then sobeit! In this case, some pointers for lightweight class creation would be appreciated. I'm not looking to add fancy colours or anything, just the ability to click on bits of text.
I think you'll need to create your own UIView sub-class to do the trick, controlled by a UIViewController subclass. One trick I've used to make it look more like an alert view is to have your main popup view embedded in a fullscreen view with a clear background.
In general, Apple SDKs make it really easy to do standard things (UIAlertView), but if you want to tinker with it (embedded links), you need to do it yourself.
Related
I have a Mac app that needs to be based on multiple modules. That is, a single window with multiple views, and the default view with a menu. That menu should open one module on the default window and then if I select another module, the contents of the window should change with another view. Those views also have different states, so I made multiple views for each module.
In a nutshell, my app is a single AppDelegate.h/.m, a single xib file, with one NSWindow object and multiple NSView views. Those views have different states, so I load different other related NSViews.
To load a view, I use [window setContentView:viewNameView]; which I know that causes the old NSView to lose state, so I need to keep them all in memory for each module.
Is this the right approach?
Thank you!
You don't describe how and where you want the menu but a widely used method is to have a sourcelist on the left and the content on the right. You see this everywhere including Apples own apps.
If you create a sourcelist on the left of your window and place an NSBox on the right side.
Set up the sourcelist (NSOutlineView) to react to - outlineViewSelectionDidChange: which is an NSOutlineView delegate method.
Here you can check the identifier on the selected item in the menu and set the content view for the NSBox accordingly with - setContentView:
Here's a great introduction to using NSOutlineViews for anyone interested.
Edit: Depending on how many views you have it might be easier to have an NSTabView (in tabless mode) and just switch tabs in the - outlineViewSelectionDidChange: method. This is also widely used and the user won't see the difference.
You will want to look up NSWindowController for managing your window and xib, and NSViewController for managing views. The app delegate shouldn't do much (in fact you probably could remove the header file and merge it with .m).
Some references to look at:
https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-04-05-windows-and-window-controllers.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/ViewController/Introduction/Intro.html
Yes that will work. What you may end up needing as well, is a custom Navigation Controller. Unfortunately Cocoa doesn't have an NSNavigationController, so you'll have to write something on your own. But basically yeah what you'll do is swap out the contentView with the next view you want to display-- and keep a stack of views you've navigated to so you can support going back (or you could use a dictionary to add transition keys to create strongly linked transitions)
Here's an good example somebody posted in a previous thread-- if you just search for Cocoa Mac Navigation Controller you should find some helpful results :)
Mac OS X Cocoa multiview application navigation
Another thing that you may want to keep in mind, which came up for me, is if your views are of different sizes. If they are, and you are using auto-layout, you will need to update the constraints to resize the window appropriately as views are swapped out
In most Apple-provided controls, you can tap and hold on the text, and get the copy/paste menu, which usually has "Speak" at the end.
I have a custom control (UIView descendant) I want to do the same with.
I can pop up my own menu no problem, and while I dont need them, copy and paste are built in, but is there any (appstore legal) way to make the control "speak" on the users command, given a block of text?
I don't want to trigger it in code without user interaction. Well, I do, but I suspect thats going to be impossible, or there would be lots of code/docs around to do it :)
VoiceOver is not an option, as the app is targeted at kids, and the change in gestures with voiceover is likely to cause problems. I already have the accessability properties set with the appropriate data, so if it is on, then that works.
Thanks!
I'm currently learning ObjC and Cocoa programming, coming from the Java world.
To test my current skills and learning progress I'm creating a small calculator app from scratch (OSX not iOS).
My UI has 10 digit buttons 0-9 among others.
My first thought was, since the action receives the senders reference, to make one action
like -(IBAction)captureDigit:(id)sender and then just grab the digit from the button title.
But the interface builder only allows an action to be connected with one sender it seems.
So I ended up creating 10 captureDigit actions in my controller.
My Question:
is the first option possible somehow? I thought of adding the actions programmatically (is this possible?) to the buttons, but then I would have to add all digit buttons as outlets to my controller.
Bonus Question:
can a NSButton hold some kind of non visible value? Could not find this in the documentation.
Maybe this would violate the MVC pattern as the UI would then know of application specific data?
Thanks for any useful and kind answer in advance, I'm still learning
You can connect many senders to one target/action if you Control-drag from senders to the target, so that's not a problem.
WRT your bonus question, any NSView has an integer tag which you can set in Interface Builder. That's a convenient way to differentiate multiple similar views.
You can definitely connect more than more button to a single action. Also, you can use the tag field of any object to give it a "behind the scenes" value.
It's perfectly possible to add as many actions to a single controller. How is Interface Builder preventing you from doing this?
You could have a NSDictionary instance in your controller, in which you could match NSButtons to whatever data you want.
To make it easy, in IB create one button and drag from NSButton to File's owner it then shows all of the methods that we can send to NSButton, then select captureDigit:. Now copy and paste the button change the title, copy and paste in IB keeps the connection and use tag field as costique, nitrex have already said.
I'm trying to create an iPhone app with a welcome screen that leads to two or three pretty disparate UIs; once you've drilled into one you're not going to have much use for the others, and each one is itself fairly complicated.
The designers are all web types and it looks like the "navigation" paradigm is the closest to what they want, but the breadcrumb-style navigation bar isn't.
If I set up a UINavigationController, can I then drive it with arbitrary buttons in the views?
And in general, is it possible to swap out the contents of a view programmatically?
And if so, what do I need to watch out for? (E.g., in Java if you change the contents of a JPanel you need to make sure it gets revalidated and repainted.)
Total iOS newbie here, coming from the Java world, super-explicit advice much appreciated. Using Monotouch, but happy to take Obj-C help and translate. :)
It's hard to tell you how to design your app with only that information, so I'll assume you want to do a drill-down thing like a UINavigation controller.
1- Yes, you can drive the UINavigationController from other ViewControllers, using methods like PushViewController() and PopViewController(). You can also hide the toolbar or some of the toolbar buttons if you want. You can find some great examples here.
2- Yes, you can change contents of a view. Views contains other views and you can add and remove them as you want.
3- The main thing to be careful about is to make sure that calls that update the view are done inside a InvokeOnMainThread(()=>{}) call. More info here.
I'm looking for some kind of a basic, straightforward example of how to work with a pair of NSScrollers in an NSScrollView with a custom NSView.
There are sporadic examples out there, largely consisting of contrived examples using programatically created interfaces, or based on the assumption that the developer is working with a typical ImageView or TextView. Even the Sketch example is based on an NSView that uses the Page Setup in the Print dialog for the bounds, and everything is managed by Cocoa. So there's no real discussion or examples anywhere of how make it all work using a custom Model (though that may be part of the problem, because what does one base the Model on?). Even Apple's own documentation is dodgy here.
Essentially, I have a sub-classed NSView enbedded in an NSScrollView (per the Scoll View Guide), that a user can click in the view to create, edit and delete objects, much like an illustration program. The Model is those objects that are just data wrappers that simply record their position for drawRect: to use. The height and width are based on custom values that are being translated into pixels as needed.
My problem is that all of the examples I have found are based on either a text editor, an image viewer, or uses the standard document sizes in the Page Setup dialog. Because these are common document types, Cocoa basically manages for the developer, so the interaction code is more or less hidden (or I'm just not seeing it for what it is). My project doesn't fit any of those needs, and I have no need for printing. Thrusting my Model into the documentView property wouldn't work.
I'm just looking for a simple example on how to initialize the NSScrollers with a custom, object-oriented Model (the documentView), and handle scrolling and updating based on user action, such as when the user drags a smattering of objects off to the left or down or the window gets resized. I think I'm close to getting it all together, but I'm missing the jumping off point that ties the controls to document.
(Not that it matters in a Cocoa question, but when I did this in REALbasic, I would simply calculate and apply the MaxX, MaxY to a ScrollBar's Maximum value based on user actions, watch the position in the ScrollBar when the user clicks, and draw as needed. NSScrollers in the NSScrollView context aren't nearly as obvious to me, it seems.)
I appreciate the time taken by everyone, but I'm updating with more information in the hopes of getting an answer I can use. I'm sorry, but none of this is making sense, Apple's documents are obtuse, but perhaps I'm missing something painfully obvious here...
I have an array of objects sitting in a subclassed NSDocument which are data holders that tell drawRect what and where to draw. This is straight from the Sketch example. The Sketch example uses the document sizes in the Page Setup dialog for the size, so there's nothing to show here. I'm cool with Cocoa handling the state of the scroll bars, but how do I link up the ScrollView to see the initial editor's state held in the NSDocument and updates to those objects and the editor? Do I calculate my own NSRect and pass that to the NSScrollView? Where and how? Am I doing this in my custom NSView which has been embedded in the NSScrollView or my NSDocument in init? The NSScrollView isn't created programmatically (there's no easy way of doing that), so it's all sitting in Interface Builder waiting to be hooked up. I'm missing the hook up bit.
Perhaps I'm wearing my "I don't get it" cap this week, but this can't be this difficult. Illustration apps, MIDI Editors, and countless other similar custom apps do this all the time.
SOLVED (mostly):
I think I have this sorted out now, though it's probably not the best implementation.
My document class now has a NSRect DocumentRect property that looks at all of its objects and gives back a new NSRect based on their location. I call it in my subclassed NSView's mouse events with
[self setFrame:[[self EditorDocument] DocumentRect]];
This updates the size of the View based on user interaction, and the window now handles the scrolling where it didn't before. At this point I'm figuring out how to get the frame to expand while dragging, but at least I now have the fundamental concept I was missing.
The answer given pointed me in the direction I needed to go here (documentView requiring a view, which translated to looking at the NSView class), so Peter gets the credit. Thanks so much for help.
The document view isn't a model, it's a view. That's why it's called the document view.
The reason there are so few examples on working with NSScrollers directly is because you normally don't. You work with NSScrollView and let it handle the scrollers for you.
All you need to do is make a view big enough to show the entire model, then set that as the document view of the scroll view. From there, it should Just Work. You don't need to manage any of the scrolling-related numbers yourself; Cocoa handles them for you.
For details, see the Scroll View Programming Guide.