Articles tagged "UIKit"
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The purpose of this post is so that I will have a link to give people when they ask: how do I write an iOS application that pulls data from an RSS feed, displays it pretty and can put things on a map. I'll show you all of that and more as I rewrite my oldest iOS application from scratch: FuelView.
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In this post I show two reusable classes for fetching data via HTTP: one that parses the result as XML and another that parses as JSON. These are relatively simple tasks but due to the number of required steps, they can become tiresome if you don't have robust, reusable code for the task. These classes will work on iOS or on the Mac but the optional error alerts and password dialogs are only implemented for iOS.
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After initially starting with a small set of fairly basic media APIs in iPhone OS 2.0, the APIs and the features they provide have dramatically increased in the past 2 years and provided a rapidly moving target for developers trying to remain current. In this post, I'll try to summarize all of the different APIs in iOS 4.3 for playing media, when they arrived, what their purposes are, what their limitations are and what it's been like to remain up-to-date and support new features.
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In this post, I'll show you the current classes I use to construct and manage UITableViews in a number of different projects. This code is an amalgamation and evolution of some ideas that I've presented in a few earlier posts including my posts on heterogenous cells in a table view and easy custom table view drawing. But this implementation also chooses to do some things differently in an effort to continuously simplify the task of creating customized tables and views in iOS.
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A few user-features of Mac OS X Lion have been announced but no Cocoa API changes have been publicly announced. However, I think there are dozens of non-user areas where the Cocoa Mac APIs could be improved by integrating approaches from Cocoa Touch APIs. What follows are a dozen areas where I'd like to see a more iOS approach in Mac OS X Lion.
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ZoomingViewControlleris a class you can attach to any existing view that will let you zoom the view to fullscreen with a single tap, rotate the view while in fullscreen by rotating the device and tap to return to the original inline state. -
In this post, I'll show you how you can load a webpage in a UIWebView in iOS while using a modified NSURLCache to substitute local copies of resources within the webpage for the remote copies referred to by the actual page.
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I was recently asked by a reader if I used any modelling program to model the classes and relationships in my Mac applications. The answer is no, I don't model the application side of my programs. The reason for this is not because applications are always small and simple. The reason is that all applications have approximately the same design — eventually everything in a well-designed application becomes intuitive.
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Bindings are one of the best ways of connecting your view and model on the Mac but due to the layers of abstraction involved — and the fact that they don't exist on other platforms — bindings can seem foreign and confusing. In this post, I'll show a complex view that is traditionally implemented without bindings (the iPhone's
UITableView) and show how it might be redesigned for the Mac with bindings. -
You don't have to look far to find people suggesting that constructing views in code will increase the speed of your program. Since interface performance is a serious concern in iPhone development, I thought I'd look at the performance speed in creating complex iPhone UITableViewCells in code versus loading them from a NIB file.
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In this post, I present a complete Cocoa Touch iPhone application implemented with unit tests for all created code. I'll look at setting up build and debug targets and executables for both Application and Logic tests, and show you some of the differences between Application and Logic tests. The code for this post is an iPhone version of the Mac post I presented last week.
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In this post, I'll discuss iPhone program design using the example of a small but non-trivial iPhone application to provide examples of how the design is implemented. The design includes: how to manage data coming from different sources, how to manage multiple views of that data and how to design your program so it remains simple and manageable as it grows. In short, I'll be discussing how Model-View-Controller (MVC) applies to an iPhone application but I'll also discuss how even simple programs are considerably more hierarchic through their controllers and branched through their models and views than the basic description "Model-View-Controller" might imply.
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Alpha masks are a powerful way to create graphical effects in your program. In this post, I'll show you how to create an alpha mask from a text string and use that mask to create text-based effects with an image. I'll also show you how to do this on the iPhone and the Mac, so you can see the differences between these platforms in this area.
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Shadows can be a useful effect, drawing attention to the content of your view by separating the view from the background. They also look cool. In this post, I'll show you how to add shadows to a UITableView using three CAGradientLayers — one above the first row, one after the last row and one for under the navigation bar.
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The Info.plist file is home to the metadata about your application used by the operating system. Most Cocoa programmers know that it stores the bundle identifier, icon name and version number of an application but the Info.plist can also control access to essential iPhone hardware resources and can change the very nature of your Mac OS X applications. In this post, I'll cover basic Info.plist usage and also explain some of the rarer settings.
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Given the attention it received and the number of bugs I know it contained, I wanted to revisit an old post of mine: Streaming and playing an MP3 stream. In this post, I'll talk about the problems the original contained, how I fixed those problems and I'll present the updated result.
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You can configure your iPhone applications so that a touch in the status bar will scroll a UIScrollView to the top. I'll show you how you can intercept this touch event to use status bar touches for other purposes. The sample application will show a hidden drawer that slides out from the status bar when you tap it.
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It is really easy to customize your
UITableViews. I'll show you how to completely customize the appearance ofUITableViews without overriding or subclassing and without the need for any tricky hackery. -
The "Text" (SMS) application on the iPhone uses a custom, semi-transparent view to show its "Sending..." message over the keyboard. I'll show you a simple class that can display semi-transparent loading messages and how you can display messages over the keyboard.
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UITableViewController and UIViewController are the two most commonly implemented controllers on the iPhone. It may not always be clear what UITableViewController adds to its superclass. I'll show you what UITableViewController does by recreating its functionality on top of UIViewController and show you why doing this can provide a richer base controller class that you can use throughout your iPhone application.
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By default, UITableView only supports single-row selection. In this post, I'll show you how to implement multi-row selection, similar to the message edit interface in Mail.
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This post looks at writing a UITableViewController for a table view that contains behaviorally unrelated rows — a common occurrence on the iPhone for tables containing multiple groups. I will present a simple alternative to Apple's UITableViewController template code that will reduce complexity and code as well as refocus areas-of-concern for this heterogeneous arrangement.
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Automated testing of application user interfaces can be tricky since user interfaces are designed for use by humans not automated tools. The iPhone is particularly challenging since existing tools that aid user interface testing on the Mac are not available. This post will show you a way to run automated, scripted tests on an iPhone app's user interface.
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If you require only a single instance of an object in your application, where should it go? How should you control and manage it? Here are some different approaches, their implementations, their strengths and their weaknesses.
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It's an iPhone post because I finally can. Here's a good way to slide your view around when editing UITextFields so that they never get trapped under the onscreen keyboard. I'll be giving a talk at the Brisbane Cocoaheads meeting this Monday evening (Oct 6). Come along and heckle.