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.
Related
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.
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!
Well, it might be hard to describe, but what I want this:
When the application fires up, I want it to load a couple of components and I want to show a progress bar loading upto 100% Complete. But for Interface sake, I just want the progress bar on the desktop. I don't want the Window controls or background. My customized progress bar should appear on the desktop loading upto 100%, followed by showing of window and thereby, the entire app.
Just to mention, I want this in a Mac App being developed in Xcode.
I strongly suggest you think about the visual effect you're considering and the assumptions you're making. I would argue this to be "bad design":
Users can put anything as a Desktop Picture. If my background happens to be blue... and your custom progress bar is blue.. then I won't see the progress bar and will be left wondering why your application isn't responding. "Screw this app, it hangs when I launch it. Delete!"
Chances are that users have more than one application running. Your "floating progress bar" would be lost in a sea of other application windows. (Why is iTunes loading something? Oh wait!! It's this other windowless thing... "Not intuitive! Not cool")
This is not very Mac-like. Don't forget there are rules for each platform as to how to be a good citizen. Metro apps need to adhere to a specific Interface paradigm. Likewise, there's a thing to be said for "Mac-like" and I would argue this behaviour isn't (a floating progress bar).
I would strongly suggest you keep your progress bar within a properly named modal window. Applications go in-and-out of being front-most... so it's important to know what that progress bar relates too.
If you've considered all these, the following question should help you get started :
How to make an NSView transparent and show what's under the NSWindow?
You are probably talking of a borderless NSWindow (NSBorderlessWindowMask), with an opaque background view whose alpha is set to zero and an NSProgressIndicator subview to show the progress. You also probably want to use the -[NSWindow center] method to nicely center your window.
However, I doubt that you want that kind of UI. A progress bar is probably not visible on top of all desktops, and thus aesthetically worthless.
I think a rounded, half-transparant black window will be more suited in your case. Take a look at Matt Gemmell's source code.
I want to create a full Screen Cocoa application, however my app is slightly different from a conventional fullscreen app.
This app would be below everything else, so underneath the menu bar and the Dock, etc. It would have a large image covering up the Desktop and icons, with a custom NSView in the middle with a table view, etc. If this concept is hard to understand then here is an image:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/6308/mockupo.png
The only part that might be a bit confusing is the background image. This background image is NOT the wallpaper of the computer, but part of the app. So when the app is launched, it goes into full screen mode and puts itself underneath the dock and the menu bar, and underneath all other windows too. So it draws the background image to cover the screen (including Desktop and icons). Then has a custom NSView in the middle containing my controls.
What's the best way to go about doing this?
Thanks
Make a borderless window, the size of the menu-bar screen (screen 0—not [NSScreen mainScreen]), positioned at 0,0, with window level kCGDesktopWindowLevel.
Remember that you will need to observe for screen frame-change notifications (when the user changes the screen dimensions), and that you should correctly handle the case of no screen at all (headless Mac).
I think #Peter Hosey’s solution should work, but to make other windows go on top, you will probably need to change the window level to something else.
But, I implore you, do not do this. This will be the most bugly application the Macintosh has ever seen. There are a lot of really good user interface paradigms that you can use, and "replicating" the main desktop interface of Mac OS X is generally not one of them. That is, unless you are reimplementing Time Machine or something like that.
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.