I have been looking for a way to display a splash screen on a cocoa app im making(not iphone) and am very new im not asking if you think its a good idea or not because i know how it could be annoying for users. Its helping me learn.
I was wondering if there was a way to create a splash screen on a timer?
could anyone breifly walk me through it or point me in the right direction?
Easiest way I can think of is to add the splash screen's window to MainMenu.xib, and mark it as visible at launch - that way you don't need to worry about loading and showing it, all that will happen by default. In your app delegate's -applicationDidFinishLaunching:, start an NSTimer instance. When it fires, send your splash window a -close message.
(Edit) Okay, I know you didn't ask if it's a good idea or not, but here's my two cents anyway - if your app needs to load & initialize a bunch of plugins or perform some other lengthy operation before it's ready to be used, then a splash screen with an updating status would be less annoying than having to sit there just wondering what's going on...
(Edit.2) More about the plugin loading. You could write a method that loads one plugin, then uses NSTimer to call itself with zero delay if there are more plugins to load. Doing it via zero-delay timers, instead of a simple for() or while() loop, would allow the run loop to stay active, so you could update a progress bar and avoid the spinning technicolor pizza of death.
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I've created a game using Sprite Kit. The game runs just like the iOS game Pop The Lock. I've already got a lot of code within my touches began. Because of this, whenever I try and add a Button to the scene and tell it to do something, all it does is start the game as I've told it to do that my touches began and it doesn't run what I tell it to. How do I add a image as a button that once I tap, it runs only that and not the other things in the touches began? I understand this is very broad but I'd like to see how people add buttons to the scene without affecting anything else. Cheers!
In my j2me blackberry application, I want to open editfield to enter text when user clicks on search icon. I have search icon added at the top right corner, when user clicks on it, I want to open basiceditfield with animating from right to left. I want Animation should be like default search on main screen in blackberry. How to do this? Is it possible?
You can do almost anything with the Blackberry Ui, if you understand it and are prepared to put the time in. But what you see when you press the magnifying glass is something that someone has spent a lot of time doing. There is API for doing anything like that (at least not one I have found). So if you are not experienced doing BlackBerry Ui, as I suspect is the case here, then I would suggest that replicating what the BB engineers have done with the animation from the search icon on the Home screen to the search screen, is too difficult to justify.
A lot of these sorts of things are, in my opinion, just gloss. They do not make the application any easier to use, just make it look flash. Personally, I would spend your time on making sure your application works well, rather than making it look flashy.
I do recommend using the screen transition animations as a way of moving from one screen to another. These are fairly easy to use and when used correctly, provide a good visual clue to your user regarding the flow through your application. I also suggest you spend some time making sure your assets (icons etc.) look good, on all the various sizes of BB that you are developing for.
You all know the Windows Phone backstack right. If you go through some apps, tap the Home key after starting each app. Now tap and hold the Backkey to see the Backstack. You can now see some small images of your apps, and can pick which one to go to right.
Question:
Is it possible to intercept before the backstack image is created? I have tried to blur my page in various events (include OnNavigatingFrom) to no avail.
My guess is some other event (probably something we don't have access to) is triggered and a bitmap is created, because when you use the Backstack to navigate you can just see a slight transition from the saved image to a real page IMO.
Does anyone know if its possible to intercept or manipulate these images on the backstack?
Example screenshot from WP emulator of the Backstack thumbnails
Following my comment, I've just tried this:
Set a breakpoint anywhere in the code
Start the app with the debugger attached, then let it reach the breakpoint
While the execution is stopped by the debugger, long press on the back button
The task switching UI is displayed even though the managed code execution is stopped
From there, I think we can safely conclude that the task switching and the thumbnail are handled entirely by native code. Therefore, there's nothing you can do.
I recently wrote a blogpost in which I discuss the ways I tried to hide data from the application snapshot. (You can read it here: http://corstianboerman.com/trying-to-hide-crucial-data-from-an-application-snapshot/)
The outcome: You just can't hide it.
I'm building a web app to design and animate simple 3d scenes using the Away3D library, but the design of the interface itself is built around a scrolling menu which takes up the whole height of the screen.
The problem is, on OSX browsers have a silly quirk where if the page is scrolled when it has already gone as far as it can, the page can be dragged slightly further, revealing a brushed metal background. This looks nice and whatnot, but it pretty much ruins scrolling in a swf object. I use flash builder and export to safari, which is just about useable, if pretty annoying (especially with a mac touchpad, which can give a much higher scroll delta than a mousewheel can), but when I open my app in firefox/chrome the same effect happens, and causes the app and browser to slow down drastically.
I've found code which uses ExternalInterface to stop the swf sending mouse events to the page, but they all seem to disable detection in the swf as well, and I can't find anything else which help. If anyone knows of a solution you'll be saving me from throwing a few months' work away for what seems like a suspiciously unnecessary drawback to Flash on OSX!
Thanks in advance if anyone can help
Figured it out, in case anyone else gets stuck with this:
The feature's called elastic scrolling, if you're running a flash/flex app which takes up all the browser space you can simply set body{overflow: hidden;} in page CSS and it'll work just fine. Obviously, this disables any kind of page-scrolling - I believe you can turn it back on inside nested elements though.
Hope this helps someone anyway!
I'm developing an application in Cocoa which allows users to draw on any given window in OS X. The drawings move along with the corresponding window when dragged on screen. To complete this tie between drawings and the windows (and their contents) beneath, I'd like to catch scrolling events from the window in order to react on the positioning/visibility of the drawings.
An example:
The user opens Safari and browses the web. On a specific website s/he draws a circle around a link and takes hand written notes (this is all considered a drawing, input by a pen tablet). Afterwards s/he moves the window, the drawings are also being moved so that they remain on top of the link on the website. Then s/he begins to scroll the website and the location of the link changes (moves up until it's outside of the viewport).
Now I'd like to catch that event and also move the layer with the drawings to keep them on top of the link. When the link is no longer visible, I'd turn off the visibility of the drawing and turn it back on when scrolling brings the link back on to the viewport.
I know this is a quite tricky assignment and being able to intercept such events from another application might as well be considered an OS security flaw but maybe someone out there is good enough a coder to give me a hint... :)
The Cocoa Accessibility classes may be helpful but until now I haven't found the solution.
Thanks for your help.
Oh, and if that's not tricky to you, maybe you can tell me how to get notified when Safari switches Tabs ;)
kkthxbai
I'm not sure if you can monitor scroll events. However, it's a lot easier if you just monitor the position of the link with the Accessibility API.
Just hold a reference to that link and constantly poll it for its position, if the position changes, you know what to do.
You could also try using AXObserverAddNotification, but as far as I am aware, there is no notification you can monitor for position changes.
If you haven't discovered it already, the Accessibility Inspector can help you a lot with identifying things that you can get using the Accessibility API and pfiddlesoft's UI Browser lets you register for notifications.