UIWebView: how to hide part of the content of a webpage? - objective-c

In my app I have a webview that is used solely for displaying the facebook page.
However, the client does not want the top blue bar of facebook to appear; he wants to hide it.
Is there a way to do this?
The bar is 45 pixels, so what I did is I moved the UIWebView in IB in such a way that its top 45 pixels are behind my navigation bar (thus not appearing).
However, this is not an ideal solution, as the user can see that content when he scrolls up, before bouncing. He can see but not touch it, which will be frustrating for some users.
I tried turning the bouncing off, but then the UI becomes too rigid, and not fluid.
I looked up in Google and Stackoverflow for a couple of hours but didn`t find a solution.
Thanks a lot!

You'll have to edit the HTML/CSS of the page itself to hide the HTML elements in question, probably using regular expressions, and feed it into your UIWebView with loadHTMLString:baseURL:.
I've done similar manipulating before and it works, but... it's a different ballgame when the webpages in question don't belong to you. Any time Facebook updates their layout, your app behavior might change until you have time to get an app update approved. Clients want what they want, but make sure your client knows what he's asking for!

First test out the javascript code used to hide whatever elements in the webpage and then pass up to stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString of UIWebView to run it.

Related

Cocoa Webview - Camouflage webview as native control

OK, I'm doing some experiments with WebView-based native OSX apps, and I'm wondering:
Which are the necessary steps in order to fully camouflage it? (So, that the user - ok, a non-technical user, actually) cannot possibly understand it's a webview.
How can we eliminate the right-click menu (including the "Reload" item)?
Last but not least:
If the actual webpage content is loaded on startup (in awakeFromNib), even for a simple webpage, it takes 1-or-2 seconds before the actual content shows up. During this time, a white/empty background shows where the webview/page should be. What could I do about that? Perhaps a "loading" indicator?
Any help will be appreciated! :-)
To eliminate the right click menu implement the webView(_:contextMenuItemsForElement:defaultMenuItems:) method of WebUIDelegate protocol.

How to have multiple proxy icons in Cocoa document windows?

Most Cocoa applications, provided they call NSWindow's -setRepresentedFilename:, will display a nice little proxy icon at the top-centre of their NSWindows.
Here's an example of the Preview app with a PDF document:
Xcode, somehow, manages to display 2 proxy icons - one for the project file and the other for the current document in the source display.
Does anyone know how they do that? window:shouldPopUpDocumentPathMenu: in NSWindowDelegate seems very close - you could probably position your custom path menus with this. But there doesn't seem to be anything that would allow you to actually display the two proxy icons themselves.
Any ideas?
Unfortunately Apple has access to APIs the rest of us don’t. Messing with the title bar is really hard.
The best I can suggest is making your window NOT have a standard title bar, and then placing the buttons yourself by calling [self standardWindowButton:X] for each of the close, resize, and miniaturize buttons you want. Then place your own document icon and title textField.
You’ll likely have to track when the window loses or gains key or main status and modify the buttons accordingly (Cocoa fetches new buttons each time this happens, not sure why). Whee! Good luck!

How can I make a scrollable TabBar...?

I'm working on an app that needs many TabBar Items (6 or 7). I don't think users like to click the "More" button on TabBars, so I'm wondering how to make my own TabBar that slides from left to right, so one can easily access all the buttons on the tabbar without pressing "More."
Thanks!
I agree with the other answer that it's a bad idea from a design standpoint.
Nevertheless, the technical answer is that you can simply embed a UITabBar in a UIScrollView. If you set the tab bar's width and the scroll view's contentSize appropriately, the tab bar will be scrollable. You will probably want to turn off bouncing and scroll indicators.
I didn't try it with a UITarBarController.
Opinions on whether this is a good idea or not aside
A simple carousel should be fairly simple to implement from scratch using a UIScrollView with UIButton subviews. which will provide all the scroll mechanics for you
As a sample idea.
A UISCrollView which spans the width of the device.
N buttons across the scroll content pane
Restrict scroller to horizontal scrolling.
Provide selected and unselected images for the buttons
Create glue code to ensure only one button is selected at a time (like Radio buttons)
But I do agree with the other posters that its a bad UI idea. Id be thinking UIToolbar for this.
Apart from considerations about UX and UI guidelines, a way you can implement such thing is implementing a tab bar from scratch. You can even find a tutorial here for iOS5.
Actually, implementing a tab bar and a tab bar controller is not difficult as it may appear at first sight, but given the effort involved, you could also ask you what value this kind of design add to your app and to the user experience.
In any case, if you decide to go for this path (a scrollable tab bar), I would suggest to make it such that the user cannot be misguided into thinking it's a standard tab bar.
That's against about every design guideline ever written for iOS.
(I know that Gift Plan for iOS has a scrollable tab bar, but it never hides items from the user.)
The HOW to do it has been accepted,
MOBILE DESIGN PATTERNS are not cast in concrete - it is about what is appropriate for YOUR app.
It used to be that web pages scrolled vertically and side-scrolling was frowned on.
But the tablet has been a game changer - people EXPECT to swipe side to side.
A comment on one case when scrolling tab view is actually highly appropriate ..
(a) Look at xFeed in App Store
This has 10+ topics like News Sports ... , easy to scroll to topic and click takes you to RSS feeds under it.
This is truly convenient for user, and in my opinion appropriate.
The alternative is to go back and forth between a menu of some kind and the target view - which could be a 2nd option, but from a quick browse experience this is good.
(b) USA Today is another example - even on its main website, has the < > arrows to scroll between topics or you can click on tabs at top. Admittedly the tabs themselves don't scroll, but you get the idea. The entire site, and the mobile experience for USA Today is strongly optimized around side swipeing between chapters.
(c) Presentations and content sites have come to be side scrolling as well.
(d) FINALLY on a Human Happiness viewpoint! People WANT TO TOUCH and PLAY with their mobile stuff. Not just tap!
So mobile touch is quite happy here. One more thing to swipe and slide :)
Here is a link of project with custom scrollable tab bar:
github - scrollable tab bar by BananaDev
It's free and provides a wide variety of customization options allowing you to fully change control.

Best way to create floating notification iOS

I've got a tabbed iPad application with just about each tab running a UIWebView. I'm getting all sorts of callbacks, like when a user tries to leave the corporate site (which only displays the company site to users). In this case, I pop up a "toast" style window that tells them to click a button to open the page in Safari. I also pop it up with a spinner and no text to indicate that a page is loading. The approximate look that I'm going for is used in lots of applications, but you can see it best when changing the volume on the iPhone or iPad. It's just a translucent rounded square that fades in and out.
Right now I've got it implemented on one of my tabs, and I did it by creating the objects (a spinner, a label, and a UIImage with the square) and then programmatically hiding and showing them using [UIView beginAnimations] and changing the label's text. It works perfectly but I've got these nagging things hovering over my interface in Xcode, and it takes a lot of setup to accomplish if I wanted it to be in another tab, which I do. I can't help but think that there's a better way to accomplish this. I thought about making and adding a subview, but that would leave a white background to the toast. What I'm thinking is creating some sort of object that I can allocate in a tab's view controller whenever it's needed.
What are your guys ideas, or have you done this in the past? I see it in a lot of prominent applications, like Reeder, so I'm sure it's been done more eloquently than I have done it.
Matt Gallagher has a great class called LoadingView here Showing message over iPhone Keyboard. I use it.
MBProgressHUD is a popular library for this, as well.

How to create a Controller to simulate the Springboard feature of the iPhone within your own application

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.