[digdog dig];

I'm Ching-Lan HUANG (黃青嵐), and this is my tumblr.

FrostyPlace Just Back!

With emoji keyboard enabler.
- #ios
- #ios4
- #retina display
- #frostyplace
- #rss
- #reader
- #app
- #iphone
- #ipod touch
1 year ago
New iOS UI Component: DDActionHeaderView
Recently, I released 3 different iOS UI Components on github.

They are
And I haven’t had a chance to talk about them all, but let me show you the first one, which is also my favorite: DDActionHeaderView.

Story of DDActionHeaderView

Back to December 2009, that’s almost one year ago, I was struggling to create my first serious iPhone utility app, lots of proof of concept design and user interface experiments ongoing back then. And one of my ideas was to create a new UI component that:
1. Combine the core concept of UIToolbar and UINavigationBar.
2. Keep the simplicity and accessibility at the same time.
3. And users can use it fast.
Rapid, is a very important notion for designing utilities on small iOS devices like iPhone or iPod touch. Those little gadgets should launch fast, do things fast, and go away fast.

For example, you don’t want your users to waste time looking at strange icons on the toolbar and trying to figure out (or just by guessing actually) what those icons do. And meanwhile, there’s no much space for you to add description next to the icons.

Icons on toolbar seems to be a simple interface with clear functionality, but things could be worse when you have four or five different looking icons on the toolbar, and the situation gets even worse when each icons are bringing up their own UIActionSheet.

It becomes some kinds of crazy knock’em down games in carnival booths, and you’re not going to win prizes from your users for that.

And DDActionHeaderView is the solution…

One Icon to Rule Them All

The gray circle on the right is called Action Picker, it contains action items. Users can tap to expand that action picker and look for actions that can be executed.

Once users tap the action item icon, the action picker shrinks back to normal, and action executed. So now:
1. You saved lots of spaces for you app on screen.
2. You got users focus on what they want when they want.
3. Action Picker designed to look like an extra layer hidden under the skin.
4. A well chosen default icon (first one) for Action Picker to display, can provide more detail information for underlying action items.
Eat Your Own Dog Food

DDActionHeaderView’s variants (e.g. dataSource protocol version) were first used in my iPhone app QR+Emoji, and the version you saw on github is a simplified version that is used in my newly released app: FrostyPlace.

Requirement
- iOS 4.0 SDK or later, demo project is using iOS 4.2GM SDK.
- QuartzCore framework.
DDActionHeaderView uses Blocks, Quartz 2D, CALayer, CAGradientLayer, CAAnimation and UIGestureRecognizer.

Screenshots

License

DDActionHeaderView and other two projects are released under MIT License.
Source code and demo are available on github.
- #UI design
- #ux
- #design
- #DDActionHeaderView
- #iOS
- #iOS4
- #story
- #programming
1 year ago
MapKitDragAndDrop 3.1 and thoughts
Update
Version 3.2 with new sample for iOS 4.2 is available here.

I just pushed some changes to github, and make MapKitDragAndDrop version 3.1:

Changes
1. iOS 3.2 responds to isDraggable property (but it’s not working), so use systemVersion to do the check. Thanks to Erich Wood (@erichwood) for the report.
2. No more synthesized by default, developers are allow to use either GCC or LLVM compiler with it.
3. New sample code for iOS 4.2
Story

In version 3.0, when -initWithAnnotation:resuseIdentifier: called, I create annotationView based on the availability of MKAnnotationView’s isDraggable property. If MKAnnotationView can handle isDraggable, I will return the built-in MKPinAnnotationView; if not, I create DDAnnotationView instead, and let it handle the drag/drop functionality.

But here comes one problem: though document said isDraggable only available in iOS 4 and later, iOS 3.2 does has this property (but not enabled). As result, my
```
self.hasBuiltInDraggingSupport = [[MKAnnotationView class] instancesRespondToSelector:NSSelectorFromString(@"isDraggable")];
```
will return YES on iOS 3.2, and create the non-draggble MKPinAnnotationView back.

So one of the quickest solution is to check system version number instead of using -instancesRespondToSelect: to decide if we need to use DDAnnotationView:
```
self.hasBuiltInDraggingSupport = [[UIDevice currentDevice] systemVersion] compare:@"4.0" options:NSNumericSearch] != NSOrderedAscending;
```
That’s one of the changes in version 3.1.

Thoughts

As for synthesized by default, I previously enabled Objective-C 2.0 Non-fragile ABI for using the “synthesized by default” feature in MapKitDragAndDrop 3.0, turns out it a pain in the butt for many developers, even Apple removed these options in latest Xcode 4 preview.

And my thoughts on ivar changed: If you really want to get rid of ivar in Objective-C, use NSManagedObject. That’s more likely to be an ideal solution to you, even though you get other messy problems. Keep using ivar is not a bad idea after all, that’s how I told myself.

So, after considering, I changed my mind, no more synthesized by default in this version, and you are allowed to use either GCC or LLVM Compiler with it now.

License

Source code is licensed under MIT license. You can download it from github.

References
1 year ago
MapKitDragAndDrop 3
Update
Version 3.2 with new sample for iOS 4.2 is available here.

With iOS 4 MapKit built-in draggable support, MapKitDragAndDrop now goes to version 3.

MapKitDragAndDrop is designed to bring drag and drop support to MapKit on iPhone platform, with just one single lightweight DDAnnotation and DDAnnotationView, users are able to drag and drop annotation pin and get the new coordinate.

For real world example, you can check out my app: QR+Emoji

In version 3, the whole project had shifted to modern runtime, using Objective-C 2.0 ABI and LLVM 1.5 compiler. So you will have smaller and faster binary that runs on both iOS 4 and ealier iPhone OS 3.1.x/3.2 at the same time.

Features
- Support both iPhone OS 3.1.x, 3.2 and iOS 4 at the same time, in the same source code.
- Use iOS 4 MapKit built-in draggable support (Yes, you get Retina Display high resolution support for free!)
- Use legacy MapKit techniques to create draggable annotations on iPhone OS 3.1.x and 3.2.
- Use Core Animation to create pin effects you saw in built-in Maps.app on iPhone OS 3.1.x and 3.2.
- Use modern runtime, Objective-C 2.0 ABI, and LLVM 1.5 compiler.
Requirements
- Xcode 3.2.3 with iOS 4 SDK or Xcode 4 Preview.
- Project file (.xcodeproj) needs to:
  1. C/C++ Compiler Version (GCC_VERSION) set to “LLVM compiler 1.5”
  2. Other C Flags (OTHER_CFLAGS) should add “-Xclang -fobjc-nonfragile-abi2” flag
  3. Base SDK (SDKROOT) should be “iPhone Device 4.0”
  4. Deployment Target (IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET) can be “iPhone OS 3.1” if you want.
Note

-Xclang here means “pass argument to the clang compiler,” and the argument is -fobjc-nonfragile-abi2. So you should add ‘-Xclang -fobjc-nonfragile-abi2’ into $OTHER_CFLAGS.

For more details, check “-Xclang -fobjc-nonfragile-abi2” is single flag with one argument.

Screenshot

License

Source code is licensed under MIT license.
You can download it from github.

References
- MapKitDragAndDrop 2.0
- MapKit annotation drag and drop with callout info update
1 year ago
Emoji in High-Def. I know, it’s HUGE.
- #qremoji
- #QR+Emoji
- #emoji
- #emoticon
- #appstore
- #HD
- #highdef
- #retina display
- #iphone 4
- #ios4
1 year ago