Puru's Blog

New Slide Out Animation for iOS (contd.)

2013-02-14T11:19:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation to my previous post. In that post I showed how to create a view and add a slide out animation just like facebook.

What we did so far...

In the last post we created a view and added two subviews to it 1. A mapview 2. A tableview. We also added a menu button in the navigation bar. Upon press of the menu button we presented the tableview from the left side of the screen using a ease-in animation option of the UIView. The following method performs the actual animation of the subviews:

-(void)menuButtonAction:(id)sender{

[UIView animateWithDuration:.25

delay:0

options:UIViewAnimationOptionCurveEaseIn

animations:^{

if(!self.tableViewVisible){

CGRect tableFrame = self.tableView.frame;

CGRect mapViewFrame = self.mkMapView.frame;

//show the table view first

self.tableViewVisible = YES;

//change the initial location of the map view

mapViewFrame.origin.x = tableFrame.size.width;

[self.mkMapView setFrame:mapViewFrame];

}else{

CGRect mapViewFrame = self.mkMapView.frame;

mapViewFrame.origin.x = 0.0;

[self.mkMapView setFrame:mapViewFrame];

self.tableViewVisible = NO;

}

completion:^(BOOL finished) {

}];

}

Animating the view with navigation bar

If you have noticed in the previous sample the navigation bar does not animate. It stays wherever it was. But in the facebook app, it does slide out the navigation bar as well. So how do we do it? Well...put the navigation bar in the view. Let's do it:

In the sample I have created a MainViewController which has it's two views that it wants to animate. This is how my storyboard looks like:

MainViewController has a topView as its view, topView has two main sub views 1. Primary View 2. Secondary View. These are the two views that we are going to animate.

Primary view has a navigation bar and a map view as its subviews. Navigation bar has a bar item (I used the system bookmark item because I could not find the correct menu image for my bar item in a such asmall time) which will actually trigger the slide out navigation.

Secondary View has a search bar and a collection view as its sub views. Secondary view is below the primary view in the view hierarchy.

The MainViewController.h file has two IBOutlet properties and an IBAction for the menu button action:

@interface MainViewController : UIViewController

@property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutlet UIView *primaryView;

@property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutlet UIView *secondaryView;

- (IBAction)menuItemAction:(id)sender;

@end

The menu button action in the MainViewController.m file looks like this:

- (IBAction)menuItemAction:(id)sender {

[UIView animateWithDuration:.25

delay:0

options:UIViewAnimationOptionCurveEaseIn

animations:^{

if(!self.secondViewVisible){

CGRect secondaryViewFrame = self.secondaryView.frame;

CGRect primaryViewFrame = self.primaryView.frame;

//show the table view first

self.secondViewVisible = YES;

primaryViewFrame.origin.x = secondaryViewFrame.size.width;

//change the initial location of the map view

[self.primaryView setFrame:primaryViewFrame];

}else{

CGRect primaryViewFrame = self.primaryView.frame;

primaryViewFrame.origin.x = 0.0;

[self.primaryView setFrame:primaryViewFrame];

self.secondViewVisible = NO;

}

completion:^(BOOL finished) {

}];

}

The main idea behind animating the view still remains the same. It uses UIView's animateWithDuration method over a duration of 0.25 second to animate the two views. During the animation primaryView's frame is changed and it's moved to the right side exposing the secondaryView underneath it. Because we are not hiding/unhiding the secondaryView, the new origin.x of the frame of the primaryView is calculated by subtracting the width of the secondaryView. For this reason you must set the width of the secondary view to the same amount by which you want your primaryView to be displaced.

The video shows what the code does:

Download Sample Project: SlidingNavigationBar

New Slide Out Animation for iOS

2013-02-10T16:23:00.003-08:00

In many recent applications on app store I have seen a new type of UIView animation. Applications like Facebook are using a new concept of slide in/out animation. This slide out animation concept can give your application a rich UI. So I thought why not create a sample application to try it out. At the end of the blog I will attach the sample project.

Let's get straight on this...

Following video shows the sample project that I wrote for this. You can see that I am using a map view as the main view and a table view as the slide in/out view.

The Main View controller

In the sample I have created a Main View Controller which is subclassed from UIViewController. This class is the root view controller for the main navigation controller. It manages our two views: 1. MapView 2. TableView. Following image shows the interface builder layout.

Let's Slide In/Out the Table View

The method to perform the actual slide in/out animation looks something like this:

It was that simple...really? What is it doing?

So the method uses UIView animation method: animateWithDuration. It gets the table view's frame and sets the origin of the map view to the width of the table view. The animation is done over a period of 0.25 seconds. You can obviously choose what ever value that best fits your need. When you select the same menu button again method also resets (slides out the table view) the entire view. That's the reason why it checks weather the table view is already hidden or not. If table view is hidden it slides it in otherwise it slides it out.

Continue reading here...

Goto Sample Project: SlidingUiView

Application has active assertions beyond permitted time

2011-10-02T05:21:00.000-07:00

If your application runs long running background task, then probably you would have seen several of these crash reports in your organizer's device logs.

"Application Specific Information:
<application_name> has active assertions beyond permitted time:
{(
<SBProcessAssertion: 0x1fa7cef0> identifier: UIKitBackgroundCompletionTask process: OpenMobile[1087] permittedBackgroundDuration: 600.000000 reason: finishTask owner pid:1087 preventSuspend preventIdleSleep ,
<SBProcessAssertion: 0x1ed0ad70> identifier: UIKitBackgroundCompletionTask process: OpenMobile[1087] permittedBackgroundDuration: 600.000000 reason: finishTask owner pid:1087 preventSuspend preventIdleSleep ,
<SBProcessAssertion: 0x1fa96c80> identifier: UIKitBackgroundCompletionTask process: OpenMobile[1087] permittedBackgroundDuration: 600.000000 reason: finishTask owner pid:1087 preventSuspend preventIdleSleep ,
)}"

What this tell is that your application is running (or has not marked a task as 'end') a background task beyond the permitted time. In order to understand this we should dive into the concept of long running background tasks.

Executing code in background on iOS

There are several ways to execute your code in background on iOS. If your applications supports one of the following background modes then it automatically gets a chance to run in background. Conditions applied...depending on the type of background mode your application can be woken up at regular intervals (voip mode), it can run until some interruption (audio mode) etc.

audio
location
voip
newsstand-content
external-accessory
bluetooth-central
bluetooth-peripheral

But what if your application does not fall in any of these category...don't you get a chance to run your code in background? Well...you do, but only for a certain amount of time. Apple decided that to be 10 minutes.

Executing a long running background task

So if your application does not fall in any of the categories mentioned above, you have to implement a long running task in order to run your code when your application transitions to background. You implement a long running task by calling this method:

[UIApplication sharedApplication] beingBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:]

What this method does is that it tells iOS that iOS must not suspend your application immediately when it transitions to background rather give time and let your application finish the critical task application was running when it was in foreground. iOS gives your application only 10 minutes though to finish your task and mark that as finished when done using the following method:

[UIApplication sharedApplication] endBackgroundTask:]

This method marks the end of any long running background task. After 10 minutes iOS calls the expiration handler passed in the first method in order to give you chance to mark the end of the background task in case you have not already done so. This is how the general implmentation would look like:

UIApplication* application = [UIApplication sharedApplication];

UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier bgTaskId = UIBackgroundTaskInvalid;

if([application respondsToSelector:@selector(beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:)]){

bgTaskId = [application beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler:^{

[application endBackgroundTask:bgTaskId];

}];

}

You can see that the expiration handler marks the end of the background task. Once the expiration handler is called and after it exits, if there are any background task id which were created by your application and not have been marked as end, iOS TERMINATES your application and generates a crash report. The excerpt of such crash report is what is shown at the beginning of this post.

Solution

In order to solve this issue I have written a BackgroundTaskManager class - a simple class to manage background tasks. It exposes only one method:

-(UIBackgroundTaskIdentifier)beginNewBackgroundTask

How this works

The class maintains a list of all the background tasks created using the above method. When the expiration handler is called it goes through all the tasks one by one and marks each of them as finished by calling the above UIApplication's endBackgroundTask method.

Download the code from here

Google+ = Mature Facebook

2011-07-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

Google+, a free service that has smart and thoughtful solutions to some irksome limits entrenched in other social-media sites, mainly related to privacy settings and how to share links and posts with groups.

Google+ seems aimed at people who are more interested in sharing things with people or groups with similar interests rather than simply amassing the biggest number of online "friends." Its seamless integration with other Google services you may use, from search to online documents, makes it easier to share things online.

Privacy settings- deciding whom you share different posts with - seems to be top of mind on Google+. That's a relief after Google's earlier debacle with Google Buzz, which had arrived unsolicited and initially created circles of friends automatically based on whom they've corresponded with on Gmail. That meant your boss could see lists of people you've been corresponding with for a new job.

With Google+, no one gets added automatically. Once you sign up, you add people - similar to how you follow people on Twitter. Then, rather than throwing everyone into the same bucket, you choose a circle to put them in.

Four standard circles: "friends," "family," "acquaintances" and "following." You can follow anyone without being accepted, whereas Facebook requires the consent of both sides. You can create new circles.

However, the privacy settings aren't perfect. Although you can choose to share a post with a limited number of people, the recipients can re-share the post further. It takes some digging to figure out that you can disable re-sharing by clicking on an icon to the right of a post. Google+ is in very early testing, so these types of settings could still change.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ also lets you edit posts after you post them and decide for each post whether to allow comments, a feature I liked.

Two other features, the ability to group video chat via webcam, called a "Hangout," and the ability to chat with a group, called a "Huddle," have proven to have so much appeal that Facebook quickly followed suit. The company said Wednesday that it will also roll out group chatting and video chatting by teaming with Internet phone company Skype. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ends up adding other Google+ features.

For example, you can't search ... yet. And there are no addictive third-party apps such as "FarmVille," which people have sunk countless hours playing on Facebook.

all in all...Google+ = Mature Facebook.

Do we need one? time will tell...

Application executable is missing a required architecture (armv6)

2011-07-08T15:24:00.000-07:00

If you have recently migrated to XCode 4 from the previous version, after building and testing your application, you might face an issue during the upload through iTunesConnect. While uploading the the application the application loader reports an error "Application executable is missing a required architecture (armv6)".

There are several blogs talking about this problem and the solution they present are:

1. Make sure that your build architectures include both "armv6" and "armv7".
2. Make sure that the build setting "Build active architect Only" is set to "NO" or unchecked.
3. In the worst case you have to create a separate project and import all your source files, resource etc. This solution is not as easy as it sounds.

You have made sure that the build setting "Build active architect Only" is set to "NO". But you noticed that your "Architectures" section is only showing "armv7" as the supported architecture. Now you want to add "armv6" there but you don't see any option in the drop down.

Here's the work around for the problem:

In the drop down list in the architectures section select "Others" and then click on the "+" button and type in "armv6" manually and you are good to go.

Build, test and upload your application.