Archive for 'iPad'

Well, this is certainly convenient: Tomorrow’s first to-do is adding a UIPopover to a UISlider in our latest project, and look what’s out there to help with that:

Adding a UIPopover to UISlider

…Today we are going to focus on the scroll bar at the bottom of a book that a user can utilize to skip to any given page within the book. This control involves a customized UISlider and a UIPopoverView that drags along with the slider as the value changes…

It’s so nice of people to work on our tasks and publish their code just in time for us to use it, isn’t it now? Should you have that same task in your near future as well, ELCSlider can be found on github … and if you don’t see any updates here tomorrow, you’ll know it works exactly as advertised!

Want your iPad reader app to have a page curl flipping interface like iBooks, but aren’t quite masochistic enough to guarantee rejection by using private APIs? Well, here’s a project for you, Leaves:

… Leaves is an simple way to present a page-turning interface similar to Apple’s iBooks. It comprises two classes, LeavesView and LeavesViewController, and occupies less than 100 kB compiled. It uses only public APIs, sacrificing a portion of iBooks’ visual flair to ensure that your application is safe for submission to the App Store…

It’s not that easily confusable with iBooks, but hey it’s kinda the same idea. Also check out the twopages branch described here.

Or, if you really want to get into your page flipping, you could take a look at these:

Implementing iBooks page curling using a conical deformation algorithm

The anatomy of a page curl

although anything that needs explanation with diagrams like this …

… yeah, that’s a good bit more hardcore than we are about our page curls. But hey, if you need to know, there you go!

h/t: cocoa-unbound!

Thinking of publishing a book displaying app to the iPad? It seems to be quite the popular thing right now, judging by our project list; and if you are too and your source is HTML, this might be an interesting project to check out: the Baker Ebook Framework.

And a very elegant designed logo for an open source project too, yes that is. As for using it, the process is designed for web developers:

To design for the Baker Framework you just have to build HTML5 pages with a fixed width of 768px and you can unleash the power of WebKit.

That’s all. Use your favorite tools, test it on the iPad from Safari, refine as much as you want.

To test it in a standard desktop browser you can download the 768px support CSS.

Then package it up in this HPub format they’re defining, drop that in the framework project, submit to the App Store, and … done!

Well, if you don’t have as long a feature list as our latest. But still, an interesting option.

h/t: @renderplace!

So yeah, today we’re starting our first iPad-targeted app. Just right out there on the cutting edge, yep that’s us. Mind you, this is the first of three iPad-targeted projects waiting increasingly restively for us to get around to them, and the intended delivery dates were … well, let’s move on, shall we.

The upside of being so far behind the curve you’re starting to lose sight of it in the distance, of course, is that all the clever people who take on less work than you do have put out good stuff to get you up to speed quickly. So let’s round up some of those:

Apple’s iPad Programming Guide and iPad Human Interface Guidelines are the first things to read, of course.

iPad Multi-Touch is a cute little project from the inestimable Matt Legend Gemmell showing how to handle the eleven (11!!) simultaneous touch events that the iPad supports.

iPad VGA Output is another snippet from same showing how to handle a VGA adapter connected external monitor.

iPadFontExample shows how to set up your plist to access an embedded .otf font and use it in UILabel and with embedded UIWebView content.

Unsurprisingly, Ray Wenderlich of cocos2d tutorial profligatality has an excellent set on iPad idioms too:

iPad for iPhone Developers 101: UISplitView Tutorial

iPad for iPhone Developers 101: UIPopoverController Tutorial

iPad for iPhone Developers 101: Custom Input View Tutorial

How To Port an iPhone Application to the iPad

Over at Dr. Touch, there’s another good porting walkthrough … and an amusing reminder of why you really really should test every config you claim to support:

From iPhone to Hybrid

How to make your Hybrid-App crash for sure

Here’s an article on how to make dealing with UIPopover controllers more straightforward:

Rewriting a Public Cocoa Touch API

And one on adding a navigation controller stack in the detail view of the UISplitViewController template:

Fixing the UISplitViewController Template

And one on setting up document support and file sharing:

iPad SDK 3.2 Document Support

There is a good bit of advice out there on how to set up the increasingly multiplicious varieties of icons and launch images needed for a universally savvy iOS application; unfortunately, most of it is wrong and/or outdated. Take it straight from the now not NDA’d mothership, whenever you read this:

Build-Time Configuration Details and App Icons QA1686

although at time of writing this post appears to be correct about icon varieties current as of iPhone 4 release, and adds some useful commentary. Also of interest may be this application named ChopShop to aid your artist/programmer workflow.

And finally, here’s some worthwhile thoughts on general iPad app and website design:

Designing for iPad: Reality Check

10 Beautiful and Usable iPhone and iPad Interfaces

48 Creative iPad Application Websites

UPDATES:

Here’s some more worthwhile tips on universal apps and such:

Migrating iPhone 3.x apps to iPad and iOS 4.0

And a better split view controller:

MGSplitViewController for iPad

And some good design advice:

Design for Mobile: iPad Design Tips

Another split view replacement, tab bar and navigation controller-friendly:

Open Source: Custom iPad UISplitViewController Allows Placement Inside Tab Bars

There’s a new version out of AQGridView — which, hmmm, doesn’t look like we’ve actually mentioned before, although the thought had crossed our minds when we saw news a little while back of its Best Developer Tool win at iPad Dev Camp. So what is this award-winning piece of spiffiness, you ask?

AQGridView is an attempt to create something similar to NSCollectionView on the iPhone. If CALayoutManager were available on the iPhone, specifically the CAConstraintLayoutManager, then this would be relatively easy to put together. However, since none of those exist, there’s a lot of work to be done.

AQGridView is based around the programming model of UITableView and its associated classes. To create this class I looked long and hard at how UITableView does what it does, and attempted to replicate it as closely as possible. This means that if you are familiar with table view programming on the iPhone or iPad, you will find AQGridView simple to pick up…

Originally written for the Kobo ebook app — free to check out!