Is there any tutorial available for creating Universal UI which can run on iPad as well as iPhone on different resolution. I tried looking in the official documentation, but couldn't find anything about UI files.
I notice you've tagged this question with Marmalade, so I'm assuming you are talking about how to write a Universal app in Marmalade? If so then creating a Universal UI is pretty much up to you to implement in the best way you see fit.
By default all Marmalade apps are Universal apps, though you can limit to iPad only with the MKB setting iphone-ipad-only.
Marmalade does come with the iwui module that allows you to lay out user interfaces with buttons and text boxes etc. but ultimately unless you have a very simple UI you'll need to either provide different UI layouts for each screen resolution/orientation you wish to support, or do some fancy laying out in code.
Apple wisely chose to persuade developers into creating separate UIs for iPhone and iPad since the one-layout-fits-all approach generally looks bad at any screen size.
Related
We've begun evaluating Xamarin for a up and coming project involving both iOS and Android, with the overriding intention to produce a single UI layer (and some share code, obviously) (I'm also new to C#)
TL;DR
I've begun exploring Xamarin on iOS. I started with the Phoneword example and it worked well enough.
The first issue I found was running the code on the iPhone X, which I was able to solve by using MainPage.On<Xamarin.Forms.PlatformConfiguration.iOS>().SetUseSafeArea(true); in the platform App class
While testing this, I noticed some issues with the ListView not scrolling properly (the core issue was actually with the platform padding).
I then used (MainPage as Xamarin.Forms.NavigationPage).On<iOS>().EnableTranslucentNavigationBar(); to enable translucent navigation bars (as we're targeting iOS 11+) and now everything appears under the navigation bar.
This is easily fixed in xCode and after some research I've found that I need to be using UIKit.UIViewController.EdgesForExtendedLayout Property, the immediate problem I'm facing is, the only "snippets" of code I can find are from the View is displayed under status bar in iOS 7 and EdgesForExtendedLayout doesn't help forum post.
Issue at hand...
The example solution snippets posted seem to be making use of a platform (iOS) specific solution. The problem is, I want to keep using the "cross-platform" code in the "platform" project and simply provide some custom configuration for the iOS platform which can apply these states.
I understand it could be possible to use a renderer, but this seems to counter-interactive, as I'd need one for both iOS and Android, where the platform page is doing just fine as it.
I understand that I could setup a DependencyService, but this seems annoying to have to include a specific "configuration" service just to solve this issue for iOS
I was hoping it might be possible to setup a iOS Page which would "override" some of the functionality of the platform page and would allow me to make use of things like viewDidLoad so I can apply the iOS specific configurations on a page by pages bases, so we could keep the platform page as it, but when running under iOS, it would provide me access to iOS life cycle of the actual view...
I've been trying to search the documentation and tutorials and haven't yet come across anything which would seem to do this or something similar (not to say there isn't one, but I'm just not finding it).
macOS apps, e.g. Photos.app, provide a help panel to the user
Is there a way to author such a Help Book in your own macOS app?
Is there a way to at least provide a toolbar to be used for a table of contents?
I am asking specifically about the UI and all the user interactions. Not how to generally create and register a helpbook.
Update
Here is what I’ve been able to find/gather/learn from others. A Help Book appears to run on a separate app/process called “HelpViewer”. Any Apple macOS app displaying a help makes use of a DDMViewerController that isn’t public.
There is an “app.css” and an “app.js” being used by the Apple macOS app “index.html” of the Apple Help Book. The Javascript one manipulates the DOM to create the “show-hide” link that toggles the Sidebar. Haven’t been able to find how to instruct HelpViewer to use a sidebar.
There is a WWDC talk from back in 2014, “Introducing the Modern WebKit API” that talks about “User Scripts” and “Script Messages” which allow communication between a Webview and Cocoa. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2014/206/
AFAICS, there is no way to have HelpViewer display a custom view or have a sidebar. My guess is that you would have to implement everything yourself. That is an NSSplitViewController, NSToolbar, NSOutlineView, any Javascript alongside the “app.css” to get the look and feel.
Currently it's not possible to implement the sidebar as shown in the Maps and other built-in macOS applications from 10.13 onward.
Versions of macOS from 10.10 (built-in applications) implement sidebar navigation with HTML and JavaScript, and Apple Help Viewer itself offers a window.HelpViewer object with some hooks that enable/disable the Help Viewer's table of contents button. Once enabled, it will callback into your own JavaScript where you can show/hide TOC via CSS or JS.
From approximately 10.10, Apple's non-built-in applications have also been using this technique. For example, iTunes and Xcode help both do this.
From 10.13, macOS has a newer version of Help Viewer that provides an actual Cocoa-native table of contents and windows splitter, as well as some new properties on window.HelpViewer; presumably these can be used to enable/disable the Cocoa sidebar and populate the TOC, but these are undocumented and I'm not sure anyone outside of Apple has been able to reverse-engineer this functionality yet.
And in any case, it wouldn't work if you offer Help Books to pre-10.13 users, and the use of undocumented API's restricts applications from the App Store (although, I'm not certain that Apple scans Help Book JavaScripts for API usage as part of their review).
(There are also a lot of other changes to how Apple's built-in application Help works now, too, but that's another topic entirely.)
Thus the answer for now is we can't, or shouldn't, or just don't know how. Alternatives include using something like using jekyll-apple-help (no affiliation) or Middlemac 3 (my project), or just rolling your own.
For those interested in knowing how Apple does it, I've documented a lot of it here (disclosure: link to my own website).
I'm not sure whether Apple's current applications still use it, but there is a very old API on macOS for Help Books. Apple has documentation on how to create them and some introduction. In short: Help books are standard HTML files with additional proprietary anchors. Those anchors are accessible via the class NSHelpManager, e.g. to open the help book at a specific page.
See also this question.
My company has just started a new development project using Xamarin Forms. The app looks great on most Android devices but on certain devices the whole app appears magnified. The font is huge, icon resolution looks poor and even the device time, connection, battery life, etc looks magnified.
Has anyone come across this before and did you find the cause?
Appreciate the help!
Will
I think that the problem is related to devices performance and it's not related with the app if problem are battery life , connection and device time , but if you talk about some poor UI you need to check your resolution folder in android or if you use default android theme so it will not look good for old android versions
Before developing the android application you should consider the below things.
1. You should take care of DPI mechanism for different device - For UI issues
2. The child hierarchy level should not exceed 4 to 6.
3. You should not create the objects inside the ondraw method.
4. Don't layout the base at all the times.
5. Inside ondraw, don't use any looping mechanism.
Say I build a super mobile friendly web application that I want in the Play Store for Android users to be able to download.
Could I use Xamarin to:
Wrap the entire mobile app as a single WebView
Register for mobile push notifications
Essentially shortlining an MVP of an android app by using an existing web app? If so, is there any well-known process or documentation that demonstrates this?
Probably the best approach for you would be using Xamarin Forms with one or more pages containing only web views.
I don't love Xamarin Forms because usually for me Xamarin Android+iOS gives a better result in similar time, but your app would be so simple that doesn't make sense to do it with Xamarin Android.
Make sure that your web app will show only what makes sense to be shown in your app, otherwise you risk to see double header/footer, useless buttons... but if the website is yours adding a few parameters to change a bit the UI won't be a problem I guess.
Have a look at this example:
https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms-samples/tree/master/WorkingWithWebview
Another approach is the use of Razor to build your pages in html directly inside your app, but if I understood well it's not what you need:
https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/advanced/razor_html_templates/
Although it is technically possible to do this as the previous answer has suggested. I would recommended firstly reviewing, the relevant stores guidelines on submissions. Apple for example will not allow a submission to their store of any application that simply mirrors the functionality of a website. I suspect Google's would likely be the same.
However that said, to answer your question, Xamarin.Forms would be appropriate for a simple application like the one you are suggesting. Or if you prefer to build to a specific OS, then in iOS with Xamarin you would use the Safari View Controller that was added in it's xcode 8.1 release. Android uses something similar as does windows.
EDIT:
You can use the Web View control in Xamarins Andorid native PCL project to encapsulate your mobile friendly website within an application here is the documentation:
Xamarin Android Developer link to Android Web View
As for push notifications, yes this is perfectly possible using Xamarin.Android. and varies on implementation depending on what you want to use as the back end to handle them, I.E. Azure's notification hub etc.
I have a codeigniter application for desktop can it be converted to a mobile app when accessed from a mobile using the same code?
You have two options, create a responsive design or create one desktop design and a mobile design based on the user agent.
If your design is easy to adapt for both worlds (desktop and mobile) with a little tweaking and a responsive design should be enough to do the trick. But before you choose this way remember that you have plenty of mobile devices with many screen resolutions.
I advise you to read this slideshow about the mobile web:
http://www.slideshare.net/bryanrieger/rethinking-the-mobile-web-by-yiibu
And just for information the types of mobile devices we have on the market.
http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/
To help you out with responsive design you can use some of the frameworks available on the internet:
Twitter bootstrap : http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html
Foundation 3: http://foundation.zurb.com/
Skeleton: http://www.getskeleton.com/
YAML 4: http://www.yaml.de/
You can see more frameworks here http://www.awwwards.com/what-are-frameworks-22-best-responsive-css-frameworks-for-web-design.html
In case your desktop layout doesn't fit as a proper mobile layout you can rely on the user agent, although he is not 100% accurate, and build two different layouts.
On the desktop side you can use some of the responsive frameworks mentioned before, for the mobile side you can use:
jQuery Mobile: http://jquerymobile.com/
iUI: http://www.iui-js.org/
UI ON TARGET: http://www.rikulo.org/
The best is a mix of the two worlds, a responsive design for small and large screens for users on a desktop and a proper design for mobile users.
the different between two is in the template or view part of application .
basically you have to identify visitor device and if it is a mobile show him the mobile view that you have prepared .
you can create great responsive mobile template using jquery mobile .
Yes, I've done exactly this in the past.
What I did is I used the user agent class to detect whether the user agent was a desktop or mobile client, and used that to set a flag in the sessions. Based on that, I served different views depending on the value of that flag. This approach has the advantage that the URLs remain the same regardless of which interface you're using.
I would recommend adding a way to manually override this, though, since detecting the user agent is never going to be 100% accurate.