Archive for 'iPad'

So in case you haven’t noticed, with 5.0 we’re up to 58, count ‘em, 58 built in font families on both iPhone and iPad. That site we mentioned last year is still up and running with pictures of all of them:

iOS Fonts – ‘A Place for Happy Typography’

Another handy reference detailing the 4.3 -> 5.0 changes can be found here:

New Fonts in iOS 5.0 – and Some Missing

If you’re looking to stand out a bit from the crowd, you might want to check out these people (h/t iOS Dev Weekly):

Mobile FontFonts. Build your app with better type.

… mobile fonts protect your brand and help set your app apart from the crowd. Optimized by hand for the iOS device screen, Mobile FontFonts enhance the user experience…

Not too sure what makes the iOS device screen overly different from any other, but hey whatever they’re doing there probably can’t hurt.

And for those of us who can’t really be bothered with paying for quality, might be worth a reminder that the sources of free fonts we mentioned way back when embedding custom fonts was, like, hard, are still all pretty much up and running; the big novelty since then is the Google Font API was released for those web folk, and to go with it a directory of open source fonts which has been chugging along nicely. As we’re sure you’ve heard, but just in case you have been under a rock the last year and a half, here’s some relevant links:

The Google Web Fonts Directory

The 10 best fonts from the Google Webfonts Directory

Download Google’s Web Fonts

Another newish site worth checking out:

Font Squirrel: “Only the best commercial-use free fonts”.

Any other particular font sources, free or paid (if they’re really awesome) that you fancy, Dear Readers?

Here’s today’s entry for the ‘Most Complicated Way To Do Something Easy’ sweepstakes:

Q: “I am trying to fade out he top/ bottom cells in a tableview. How do I achieve this effect?”

A: Adding Fading Gradients to UITableView

… have the part for the table view “cut out” in the image, i.e. have the center portion be Alpha 0 and the top and bottom would be an alpha gradient from 100% to 0%.

A designer versed with Photoshop could easily create something like this for you. Then you put this imageView on top of your table view, size the table view to fit inside the border. Finally you will want to make sure that userInteraction is disabled on the imageView, because otherwise no touches would be reaching the table view…

Yep, we’ve done exactly that several times, and used the same technique for custom-looking UIPickerView constructions and the like. That wouldn’t be worth bothering to mention, would it now? No, no it would not. But a lesson in how to spend a few hundred lines of code accomplishing the same task as taking ten seconds to drop on a PNG, well that’s worth a post just in case you ever have a hard problem that knowledge of CALayer masking would be actually needed to solve, yes?

While this solution is simple it does not satisfy me personally. As developer I want to achieve such an effect entirely in code because then it has the added advantage of being independent or resolution or interface orientation.

The first thing we’ll try is to mask the layer of the table view. On iOS each UIView has a CALayer that takes care of the actual drawing. And each CALayer has a mask property where you can set another layer to mask out parts of the host layer…

… If we stopped here then you would get the gradients, but they would move together with the contents of the table view. Luckily table views are UIScrollView child classes and thus you can also implement the UIScrollViewDelegate methods. We are using the one that fires on each movement to adjust the position of the masking layer…

… There’s another problem that only becomes apparent if you start scrolling and the vertical scroll bar shows: it is also affected by the mask which you probably don’t want because it looks weird. So instead of actually use the mask for the regular layer masking we add it as a sublayer…

Whilst our personal standards of satisfaction tend to place a vastly higher value on expediency and efficiency of client contentment … hey, there’s nothing more expedient and efficient than picking up tips from those of a more recherché inclination!

Now this is just all kinds of awesome. If you work on multiple iOS projects, you need this:

QuickLook plugin for Mobile Provision files

Let me introduce a new QuickLook plugin. This plugin allows you to get a QuickLook preview for all .mobileprovision files.

It gives you the name of the profile, its creation and expiration date, its App ID, and a sorted list of all the UDIDs included…

BEFORE:

“What the fluff is ‘E0F7F8BB-FB85-40BF-BFF4-830D526994E1.mobileprovision’”?

AFTER:

Yep, that’s some serious awesomeness indeed. Grab it right here!

h/t: @akosmasoftware!

So you know that thing where you can’t present transparent screens with -presentModalViewController, it always blanks out the view being presented over? Kinda annoying when what you really want is something like this, right?

But it’s not overly difficult to fake it by animating views around, so that’s what we’ve done in the past. But today we had a situation where a full screen view navigated to on the phone was to be a modal view rolled up from the bottom on the iPad, and we really didn’t want to go to the effort of duplicating all the controller logic, so we looked around a bit to see if anyone clever had found a good way to handle the situtation — and as you can no doubt guess from the above shot, we found it:

iOS: Semi-modal date picker for iPhone

Title notwithstanding, it’s not just for date pickers, although the one above is provided; it’s a nice little piece open sourced on github to present any view controller and its bits with translucency where desired, which the author calls “semi-modal”; and pretty much all you have to do is

1) Instead of -presentModalViewController, call

-(void)presentSemiModalViewController:(TDSemiModalViewController*)vc;

2) Instead of -dismissModalViewControllerAnimated, call
-(void)dismissSemiModalViewController:(TDSemiModalViewController*)vc;
And that’s just about it! Well, there’s some hardcoded phone screen sizes in there, but it’s just a couple lines to make it iPad-friendly. Sure beats stacking all your rollup views and their logic in the parent … especially when you’ve got them already written as separate controllers, yep.

h/t: Stack Overflow!