Stanford CS193p

Developing Applications for iOS Fall 2013-14

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

Today
UITextView
Scrollable, editable/selectable view of a mutable attributed string.

View Controller Lifecycle

NSNotification

Finding out whats happening as a VC is created, hooked up to the View, appears/disappears, etc. The radio station communication mechanism of MVC. Today well just talk about tuning in.

Demo
UITextView NSAttributedString, NSMutableAttributedString, NSTextStorage UIFont, UIColor NSNotification

View Controller Lifecycle

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

UITextView
UITextView
Like UILabel, but multi-line, selectable/editable, scrollable, etc. Obtain the NSMutableAttributedString representing the text in the UITextView using ...
@property (nonatomic, readonly) NSTextStorage *textStorage; NSTextStorage is a subclass of NSMutableAttributedString. You can simply modify it and the UITextView will automatically update. New in iOS 7.

Set its text and attributes via its NSMutableAttributedString

Fonts can, of course, vary from character to character in UITextView. But there is also a property that applies a font to the entire UITextView ...
@property (nonatomic, strong) UIFont *font;

Setting the font

Changing the font of every character will not reset other attributes (e.g. color, underline, etc.). However, you will lose your symbolic traits!
Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

UITextView
Advanced layout in UITextView with TextKit
This property denes where text can be in the UITextView ...
@property (readonly) NSTextContainer *textContainer;

This object will read characters from textStorage and lays down glyphs into textContainer ...
@property (readonly) NSLayoutManager *layoutManager;

These objects are quite powerful. For example, textContainer can have exclusion zones specied in it (owing around images). Check them out if youre interested in typography.

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

Demo
Attributor
UITextView NSAttributedString, NSMutableAttributedString, NSTextStorage UIFont, UIColor

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

View Controllers have a Lifecycle Why does this matter?
A sequence of messages is sent to them as they progress through it. You very commonly override these methods to do certain work. Creation. MVCs are most often instantiated out of a storyboard (as youve seen). There are ways to do it in code (rare) as well which we may cover later in the quarter. Outlet setting. Appearing and disappearing. Geometry changes. Low-memory situations. At each stage, iOS invokes method(s) on the Controller ...
Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

The start of the lifecycle ...

What then?

View Controller Lifecycle

After instantiation and outlet-setting, viewDidLoad is called
This is an exceptionally good place to put a lot of setup code.
- (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad];

/ / do some setup of my MVC

}

/ / always let super have a chance in lifecycle methods

But be careful because the geometry of your view (its bounds) is not set yet! At this point, you cant be sure youre on an iPhone 5-sized screen or an iPad or ???. So do not initialize things that are geometry-dependent here.

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

(argument is just whether you are appearing instantly or over time via animation)
- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated;

Just before the view appears on screen, you get notied

Your view will only get loaded once, but it might appear and disappear a lot. So dont put something in this method that really wants to be in viewDidLoad. Otherwise, you might be doing something over and over unnecessarily. Do something here if things you display are changing while your MVC is off-screen. Later we will use this to optimize performance by waiting until this method (as opposed to viewDidLoad) to kick off an expensive operation (probably in another thread). Views geometry is set here, but there are other (better?) places to react to geometry.

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

This is where you put remember whats going on and cleanup code.
- (void)viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated {

And you get notied when you will disappear off screen too

/ / call super in all the viewWill/Did... methods / / lets be nice to the user and remember the scroll position they were at ... [self rememberScrollPosition]; / / well have to implement this, of course / / do some other clean up now that weve been removed from the screen [self saveDataToPermanentStore]; / / maybe do in did instead? / / but be careful not to do anything time-consuming here, or app will be sluggish / / maybe even kick off a thread to do what needs doing here (again, well cover threads later)
[super viewWillDisappear:animated]; }

There are did versions of both of the appearance methods

- (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated; - (void)viewDidDisappear:(BOOL)animated;
Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

Most of the time this will be automatically handled with Autolayout (next week). For example, autorotation. You can reset the frames of your subviews here or set other geometry-affecting properties. Between will and did, autolayout will happen (well talk about that next week).
- (void)view{Will,Did}LayoutSubviews; Called any time a views frame changed and its subviews were thus re-layed out.

Geometry changed?

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

When the device is rotated, the top level view controller will have its bounds reoriented iff ... The view controller returns YES from shouldAutorotate. The view controller returns the new orientation in supportedInterfaceOrientations. The application allows rotation to that orientation (dened in Info.plist le). Generally it is a good idea to try to support rotation in MVCs. Well talk about that next week.

Autorotation

Specic notication that rotation will/did happen

- (void)willRotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)anOrientation duration:(NSTimeInterval)seconds; - (void)willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOriention)orient duration:(NSTimeInterval)seconds; - (void)didRotateFromInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)anOrientation;

This property will have the current orientation when each of the above is called ...
@property UIInterfaceOrientation interfaceOrientation;

Its pretty rare to implement these. Autolayout and viewWillLayoutSubviews usually sufce.
Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

This rarely happens, but well-designed code with big-ticket memory uses might anticipate it. Examples: images and sounds. Anything big that can be recreated should probably be released (i.e. set strong pointer to nil).

In low-memory situations, didReceiveMemoryWarning gets called ...

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

awakeFromNib
This method is sent to all objects that come out of a storyboard (including your Controller). Happens before outlets are set! (i.e. before the MVC is loaded) Put code somewhere else if at all possible (e.g. viewDidLoad or viewWillAppear:). Anything that would go in your Controllers init method would have to go in awakeFromNib too (because init methods are not called on objects that come out of a storyboard). - (void)setup { }; / / do something which cant wait until viewDidLoad
- (void)awakeFromNib { [self setup]; }

/ / UIViewControllers designated initializer is initWithNibName:bundle: (ugh!)

- (instancetype)initWithNibName:(NSString *)name bundle:(NSBundle *)bundle { self = [super initWithNibName:name bundle:bundle]; [self setup]; return self; } It is unlikely you will ever need to use awakeFromNib in this course.

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

View Controller Lifecycle

Instantiated (from storyboard - many ways for this to happen which well cover later) outlets get set (when geometry is determined) viewWillLayoutSubviews: and viewDidLayoutSubviews: (next group can happen repeatedly as your MVC appears and disappears from the screen ...) viewWillAppear: and viewDidAppear: (whenever geometry changes again while visible, e.g. device rotation) viewWillLayoutSubviews: and viewDidLayoutSubviews: (if it is autorotation, then you also get will/didRotateTo/From messages--rare to use these) viewWillDisappear: and viewDidDisappear: (possibly if memory gets low ...) (there is no unload anymore, so thats all there is)
Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

Summary

awakeFromNib viewDidLoad

didReceiveMemoryWarning

Demo
Attributor
View Controller Lifecycle How (and when in the VCL) would we outline the text on the Outline button?

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

NSNotification
Notications
The radio station from the MVC slides.

NSNotificationCenter
Get the default notication center via [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] Then send it the following message if you want to listen to a radio station: - (void)addObserver:(id)observer / / you (the object to get notied)
selector:(SEL)methodToInvokeIfSomethingHappens name:(NSString *)name / / name of station (a constant somewhere) object:(id)sender; / / whose changes youre interested in (nil is anyones)

You will then be notied when there are broadcasts

- (void)methodToInvokeIfSomethingHappens:(NSNotification *)notification { notification.name / / the name passed above notification.object / / the object sending you the notication notification.userInfo / / notication-specic information about what happened }

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

NSNotification
Be sure to tune out when done listening
[center removeObserver:self];

or
[center removeObserver:self name:UIContentSizeCategoryDidChangeNotification object:nil];

Failure to remove yourself can sometimes result in crashers. This is because the NSNotificationCenter keeps an unsafe retained pointer to you. A good place to remove yourself is when your MVCs View goes off screen. Well see how to nd out about that later in this lecture. Or you can remove yourself in a method called dealloc (called when you leave the heap).
- (void)dealloc {

/ / be careful in this method! cant access properties! you are almost gone from heap!
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self]; }
Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

NSNotification
Watching for changes in the size of preferred fonts (user can change this in Settings) ...
NSNotificationCenter *center = [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter]; [center addObserver:self selector:@selector(preferredFontsSizeChanged:) name:UIContentSizeCategoryDidChangeNotification

Example

/ this stations broadcasts arent object-specic object:nil]; /

- (void)preferredFontsSizeChanged:(NSNotification *)notification {

/ / re-set the fonts of objects using preferred fonts

}

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

Demo
Attributor
NSNotification

More View Controller Lifecycle

Stanford CS193p Fall 2013

Next Time
Wednesday
Multiple MVCs in one application
UITabBarController UINavigationController

Using inheritance with Controllers Assignment 3 Handed Out (due next Wednesday)

Friday

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Stanford CS193p Fall 2013