How can I program a custom partial or sub view for a calculator? - objective-c

Question

I'm building a basic calculator app. The calculator is already fully functional with basic features. The problem I'm having is I ran out of room on the screen to add other, more advanced features. Ideally what I would like to do is create some kind of subclass and view that slides up to to the bottom of the label (where the completed calculations are displayed), when a button on the bottom of the screen is pressed. In other words, I want a view with more operators and computation options to slide up to the bottom of the label and I dont want this view to cover up any digits that are being displayed in the label. Is there anyway to achieve this?

Answer 1

Yes, you can. When your button is pressed, create your new view (with the extra functions), add it as a subview to self.view, and animate a change to it's frame, so that it's frame changes from below the visible view to just below your digits.
Like this:
-(void) buttonPressed {
UIView *myNewView = << create your view >>
myNewView.frame = CGRectMake(0,480, 320,200); // or whatever your width and height are
// 480 means it will be below the visible frame.
[self.view addSubview: myNewView];
float bottom_Y_of_digit_display = 100;// or wherever it is...
[UIView beginAnimations:nil contenxt:nil];
[UIView setAnimationDelay: 0.0];
[UIView setAnimationDuration: 1.0]; // one second.
myNewView.frame = CGRectMake(0,bottom_y_of_digit_display, 320,200);
[UIView commitAnimations];
}

Answer 2

You can use UIAnimations to create an animation out of any changes to UIView properties. You can make your UIView hidden by settings its frame.origin.y to 480 and then change the rect and wrap it in a UIAnimation.
[UIView beginAnimations:nil context:nil];
[UIView setAnimationDuration:0.75];
CGRect newFrame = newSubView.frame;
newFrame.origin.y -= newSubView.frame.size.height;
newSubView.frame = newFrame;
[UIView commitAnimations];
UPDATE
If you are targeting iOS 4.0 and later then you should use the new UIAnimations interface.
UIViewAnimationOptions options = UIViewAnimationOptionCurveLinear;
[UIView animateWithDuration:0.75 delay:0 options:options
animations:^(){
CGRect newFrame = newSubView.frame;
newFrame.origin.y -= newSubView.frame.size.height;
newSubView.frame = newFrame;
}
completion:^(BOOL finished){
//Do something upon completion
}];