I know that iOS 5 allows for UINavigationBar customisation, but I'm not sure it does what I need. I want to remove the bar entirely, or at least make it invisible, but keep the buttons (backButton, rightBarButton, etc) and replace them with my own images. I could implement actual buttons, but keeping the navBar is far more convenient as I want to use its behaviour. Is this possible? Many thanks.
You can set the navBar to hidden and handle all of the navigation yourself. The navigation controller is still there, but navigation is overridden with your custom buttons.
Related
I have in the UINavigationBar status information about the health of the app. It change the title text color, and one of the buttons there.
The changes work fine, but I wish to provide a smooth animation (because the status update on data changes) but don't know how. I'm not asking about moving to another views, but about how animate only the UINavigationBar titles & buttons.
I don't think you can animate those things without some extra work.
A navigation bar is a complex beast, and by default the UI objects that appear on the screen are private and maintained by the navigation bar or the current navigation item.
There should be a way to make it work however.
The current navigation item has a property titleView. normally it's nil and the navigation bar displays a title string itself. But if you plug a UILabel into the titleView property then you should be able to do animations on the animatable properties of the titleLabel.
Likewise with the bar button items.
I added a Navigation Bar to the .xib.
I did that because I want to customize a lot of things of it. I want my navigation controller to use that navigation bar in that screen.
I created the outlet named navBar and did:
[self.navigationController.navigationBar = navBar;
But it says that navigationBar is readonly. Is it possible to link my existing navigation controller with the navigation bar that I added to the screen?
It sounds to me that you may not actually want to use a UINavigationBar. As it states in the reference documentation:
The UINavigationBar class implements a control for navigating hierarchical content. It’s a bar, typically displayed at the top of the screen, containing buttons for navigating up and down a hierarchy. The primary properties are a left (back) button, a center title, and an optional right button. You can specify custom views for each of these.
So if you're planned customizations go beyond adding buttons, changing it's color / background, opacity, hiding etc.. you might be better off creating a UIView that mimics the look & feel of a navigation bar.
Here's an example of how to give your UIView that gradient look of a navigation bar.
It's far more flexible and actually quite easy to do BUT you've got alot of reading and testing ahead of you :).
Just in case if it's just buttons you're thinking of adding you might be better off using UIToolbar instead
You can't do that. Since the navigation controller's navigation bar has a lot of settings embedded, it's a readonly property and you shouldn't be able to change it.
What exactly are you trying to achieve that you need to do that via interface builder. I mean, with the newest APIs, it should be simple to do everything you want with a few lines of code, by customising the original navcontroller's navbar.
You would not manage a navigation bar in interface builder. Also, you would not try to set the navigationBar property of the navigation controller.
To make changes you would make changes to the navigationItem property of the navigationBar
[self.navigationController.navigationBar setItems:newNavItems];
You can also make other changes to the navigationBar such as setting a background image or making it translucent
self.navigationController.navigationBar.translucent = true;
[self.navigationController.navigationBar setBackgroundImage:img forBarMetrics:barMetrics];
I'm working on a iPhone app which shows an mobile webform in a UIWebView. I'm using a default iOS layout with a navigation and tab bar.
The mobile webform is displayed in a UIWebView in the white area. Since the webform has a lot of input fields, we really need as must space for it as possible. Because of this, we are planing to remove the tabs in the bottom. Over time, there will be more tabs/sections, so it is not a solution to just add a button for each section in the left side of the navigation bar. On a iPad a popover could easily be used to handle this.
Is there a standard iOS layout mechanism to handle this change of sections/views without using tabs?
You could do something long the lines of Path or the new Facebook app and have the "table of contents" behind the Navbar and the navbar slides away (along with the child view) to reveal it. When done right (ie smoothly) I think the effect is really cool.
This would also work great as you add more and more options, since the table could just scroll.
Here is a framework that might be you started: http://www.cocoacontrols.com/platforms/ios/controls/iiviewdeckcontroller
I would consider replacing the navigation bar's title with a control that lets you switch between tabs. You can assign the bar's titleView property to a control or a button and it will generally do the right thing.
If you're limited to 2-3 tabs, you could simply use a UISegmentedControl.
If you want more, you could use a button which, when tapped, pops up a view that allows you to select the view you want. This could be a modal table view, or you could slide up a UIPickerView from the bottom of the screen, similar to the keyboard.
I use this technique in an app of my own, screenshots here. Tapping the button cycles between views (in this case, I'm changing the contents of the table cells); tap-and-hold slides up a picker.
Another possibility would be to arrange your different forms on pages in a scroll view with a page control at the bottom, à la Weather. The best option, though, if you’re going to have a particularly long list and want to keep your screen real estate, is probably the FB/Path-style sidebar table.
I ended up using a UIActionSheet but I think it in other situations would be more stylish to use a controller like the IIViewDeckController.
I have a UITabBarController displaying a number of settings-screens in my app. I want them to be shown on just a part of the screen for layout reasons. In fullscreen, the lists become unreadable (too wide), there are just a few controls per page making the page feel very empty, and the tabbar buttons are far away from the content (Fitts law).
Using presentModalViewController with the UIModalPresentationFormSheet style gives me the size I want. I do this on top of an empty background, since in my case it doesn't make sense to display anything behind it. The "real" working area is displayed with another presentModalViewController in fullscreen mode on top of it all.
This works but feels like a hack. One problem is, I can't make the background behind the settings dialog move in the transition to fullscreen with the UIModalTransitionStyleFlipHorizontal style.
TL;DR
Can I embed a UITabBarController non-fullscreen in another "background"-view? I can't find any information of how I would do this.
Can I embed a UITabBarController non-fullscreen in another "background"-view? I can't find any information of how I would do this.
Why don't you try it out?
Create a container view of the size you want the tab bar controller to have.
Create the tab bar controller.
[containerView addSubview:tabBarController.view];
I am using code from http://osmorphis.blogspot.com/2009/05/multiple-buttons-on-navigation-bar.html to implement multiple buttons in the navigation bar.
The huge problem I have now is that this construction "leaks" into the main window. By this I mean that if I press (up to about 15px) below the navigation bar the buttons still respond. How can I fix this?
Or does someone have a better way to implement multiple buttons?
It seems likely that your button bounds are extending beyond the navbar bounds. You can confirm this by setting the color of the button to something other than clear. To fix this you can either fix the frame of the buttons, or make sure clipsToBounds property of the containing view is set to YES.