Archive for February, 2013

If you are having problems adding custom fonts to XCode for use in iOS projects, ensuring that you’ve added them to the projects resources, have correctly referenced their filename in the project’s .plist file and setup your custom font with:

UIFont *customfont = [UIFont fontWithName:@"font name" size:16]

If it’s still not working then check the string you’re using for the font. It has to match what font name XCode has for the font, not the font’s name or even what Font Book says the name is for the font. Here’s an easy way to log all of the fonts included in your project and therefore use the correct reference:

for ( NSString *familyName in [UIFont familyNames] ) { NSLog(@"Family %@", familyName); NSLog(@"Names = %@", [UIFont fontNamesForFamilyName:familyName]); }

Easy.

Here’s some more discussions on Stack Overflow with various other problems and solutions.

An app we’re working on required the background of a UIView to animate through a number of colours in a loop and we wanted to share the solution with you.

Create an array of as many colours as you want and set-up your array index in your view (we did it in viewDidLoad but it could be anywhere)

self.backgroundColours = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
[UIColor colorWithRed:64/255.0 green:70/255.0 blue:69/255.0 alpha:1],
[UIColor colorWithRed:221/255.0 green:71/255.0 blue:77/255.0 alpha:1],
[UIColor colorWithRed:221/255.0 green:77/255.0 blue:117/255.0 alpha:1],
[UIColor colorWithRed:227/255.0 green:124/255.0 blue:168/255.0 alpha:1],
[UIColor colorWithRed:228/255.0 green:136/255.0 blue:115/255.0 alpha:1], nil];

self.backgroundLoop = 0;

Then create an animateWithDuration function that calls itself:

- (void) animateBackgroundColour
{

	if (self.backgroundLoop < self.backgroundColours.count - 1)
	{
		self.backgroundLoop ++;
	}
	else
	{
		self.backgroundLoop = 0;
	}

	[UIView animateWithDuration:4 delay:0.5 options:UIViewAnimationOptionAllowUserInteraction
					 animations:^(void)
					{
						self.backgroundView.backgroundColor = [self.backgroundColours objectAtIndex:self.backgroundLoop];
					}
					 completion:^(BOOL finished) {
						 if(finished)
						 {
							[self animateBackgroundColour];
						 }
	}];
}

And that’s it. The UIViewAnimationOptionAllowUserInteraction is important so that input can be used for the rest of the interface as by default when an animation is playing interaction is disabled. You can include as many colours as you require. If you need to stop the animation then either call:

[myView.layer removeAllAnimations];

Which will remove all of the animations currently playing, which is fine if this is the only one. Alternatively you can start a new , very short, animation on the background colour that returns it to its original (or new) state. This will override the looping animation nicely. Here’s a few tricks people have used to do this very thing, you may find one or more works for your situation.