I made a tab bar application that has only one xib file. If you have have made tab bar applications before then you probably know what I did so I don't really have to explain it. I deleted the two xib files and used MainWindow.xib. I just added views to each tab bar button and assigned view controllers to each of them.
So now I have a tab bar application with multiple views and buttons and only one xib file. Would it be better to have a separate xib file for each view in order to conserve memory? Does it make any difference?
Also, why is the tab bar template so weird? Is it somehow better for resource management? In every tutorial I've seen about making tab bar apps people deviate from the template.
Yes it is better for resource management to have multiple xibs. When a xib gets loaded it loads all of its content at once. If you have a tab bar application for instance, each of the views associated with a tab will be in memory at the same time, which is inefficient.
However, if your application is simple enough it doesn't really matter, so do whatever is easiest in that case.
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
Lets say I have a scene which includes a UIView container on the top half of the screen, and a UIView container on the bottom half of the screen and a few buttons at the very bottom of the screen.
Basically the bottom container will always display static text while the buttons across the bottom will change the content of the top container which may include an image, more buttons, or more text depending on what button is pressed on the bottom. Also each time a bottom button is pressed the top container is transitioned to the new view with a flip from bottom transition.
I have achieved this purely programmatically, but decided to convert my app to a storyboard file since it makes producing the rest of my app much faster and simpler, plus makes the code not look like a crazy mess.
My limited understanding of storyboards seems to deduce that I would need a separate story board scene for every UIView change, and Apple's coding conventions with storyboards seem to imply that we should use a new ViewController every time you create a new scene. All this adds up to an even bigger mess than I currently have.
Is there a better way of doing this? Am I misunderstanding something? If I am not confused, is there some way to make all these scene and view controller duplication cleaner?
The storyboard editor makes it difficult to do what you're describing, because it doesn't let you edit freestanding views associated with a scene.
I suggest you just create a separate nib (not storyboard) for each of the top-half views. These can exist separate from your storyboard. Your view controller (which is instantiated from the storyboard) can then load whichever nib it needs when a button is pressed, and put the view from the nib into its (the view controller's) top-level view.
There must be a way!
I accidentally opened one one day (see attached image). Although I have no idea how I did it and really really want to know, I cannot reproduce it, nor close it. The UIView opened when I was dragging my connection for the table header view from the Connections Inspector to the list of controls on the left side of the screen (not to the actual UIViewController).
I too am reworking a project with storyboards and have a similar problem with multiple views per UIViewController.
In this case it is a table header. I have other UIViewControllers in the project with the same configuration but I cannot get them to pop up either.
I have been using the storyboard to make an application and currently there are many segues and several components. This is causing a ton of lag when I try to do anything inside the storyboard. Is there a way to hide components inside the storyboard? thanks.
+1, For the potentially features to improve Xcode. Now, there is no way you can hide those views (Not that I know). But I would suggest you to,
Hide the debug areas you don't need.
Hide the document outline while working with segues.
Why?
I think in this way whenever you are making changes, system does not have to repaint those unwanted views and long document outline. Probably this will be less laggy(I don't think there is a word like this)!
Work around
Divide your segue into different meta segues and then you can call those segues from your main segue. In that way you don't have to put each connection on one file but you condense it!
And here we go the documentation for it! Now you can get the story board by different file and then initiate with the UIViewController easily. Then you can just use old ways to segue between different ViewControllers.
Apple Documentation for UIStoryboard
Demo App.
In order to achieve this, I have made a quick demo application which will help any future visitors.
https://github.com/Krutarth/LargeStoryboardManagement
Visually something like this,
You can split one huge storyboard into multiple small storyboards.
Select the view controllers that you want to move to a smaller storyboard, then
In the top menu, click Editor -> Refactor to Storyboard
Save the new storyboard with the desired name. XCode will auto generate all the required storyboard links from your large storyboard to this newly created small one.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to change between different custom views in my XCode project.
I have my Main nib file, consisting of 1 main window, and 5 custom views. The main window consists of 5 buttons, all which need to connect to the different views. So for example I click on button 1 and it closes the current menu and loads custom view 1.
I'm having trouble figuring out how this would be done.
I guess I would create IBOutlets for the 5 different buttons and the 5 custom views, and connect them to different methods such as openView1, openView2, where each method would close the current menu and load the custom view?
Could anyone help me code-wise how I would achieve this?
Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks
So essentially you want a tab view?
You can make an NSTabView in Interface Builder. Set the number of tabs to 5. Then lay out the contents of the views you want inside that.
If you are happy using the standard system provided visual look for your tabs, then you're done. If however you want to have custom buttons that switch tabs, read on.
With your tab view selected, set its style to Tabless:
This makes the tab buttons disappear. That means that switching between views needs to be done through code. First you'll need an IBOutlet that represents your tab view itself: connect that up. Then write an IBAction method for openView1:, that might look something like this:
- (IBAction)openView1:(id)sender
{
[tabView selectTabViewItemAtIndex:0];
}
Make yourself a button (that sits in your window somewhere outside the tab view, otherwise you'd only be able to access it from one tab!) and connect it to this action.
This is probably the easiest way to get going with an interface like this. There's a whole bunch of ways to improve on it depending on how you want to structure your code. For instance, it sounds like you're coming from iOS development, where you'd make a UIViewController for each tab. Well, on the Mac there exists NSViewController, so you can use a similar pattern: but if you do you'll need to write some code that handles getting your view controllers' views into your tab view. It doesn't happen automatically through Interface Builder like it does on iOS. This tutorial should get you started if you choose to go that route.
I am new to iOS developement, and i am trying to understand the whole cycle of iOS application developement, and i feel there's a missing part i just don't get it..
if the MainWindow.xib that is generated automatically by Xcode has a view that loads another xib/nib view inside it, then why we use it ?
Your application needs a window so the system can display it to you on the device screen. In the window are various views which represent different areas of your application that users can interact with. Views can either be entire user interfaces, or individual UI controls.
The main window interacts with your application delegate to handle events that your application receives through the views.