Crazy easy dialogs for iOS devs: QuickDialog(github.com)
github.com
Crazy easy dialogs for iOS devs: QuickDialog
https://github.com/escoz/QuickDialog
24 comments
I'm not really moving out of the tableview delegate. There's still a QuickDialogTableViewDelegate class that does the cellForRowAtIndexPath work you mentioned, and you can still override that if you would like.
In my view, having the view controller being responsible for creating the cells, like most people implement it, is a pretty bad behavior per se. It works great for little problems, but at a point it simply doesn't scale: you end up with a viewcontroller with dozens of methods and thousands of lines of code about displaying views inside your viewcontroller, which is just not a good place for it: different responsabilities should go to different objects. Besides, if you have to display cells of 5-10 different types, your viewcontroller will become ridiculously large pretty quickly.
QuickDialog solves that responsability problem by delegating the creation of cells to separate classes, that know exactly what they're supposed to do. In my view, this is just good OO design, honestly.
THanks a lot of the NSFormatter bit, I'll keep that in mind!
QuickDialog solves that responsability problem by delegating the creation of cells to separate classes, that know exactly what they're supposed to do. In my view, this is just good OO design, honestly.
THanks a lot of the NSFormatter bit, I'll keep that in mind!
I'm not objecting to UITableViewCell subclasses to manage each type of view -- thats a nice, reusable design. getCellForTableView:controller: to return an instance of a given cell is essentially what I do (although I keep it as a class method on UITableViewCell instead).
My objection is to RootElement and QuickDialogController. What happens if you have to present a screen from multiple places? Or if you need to modify it at a later date, to, say, add another field?
For example: Say you have a login screen. And now you want to add a field to ask the user for another bit of information. With your design, you have to know everywhere that you can possibly log in from. Or, you have to add a method somewhere to set up the login view and then push it. And at that point, you might as well just make a separate controller to control everything. Which brings us back to tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:.
My objection is to RootElement and QuickDialogController. What happens if you have to present a screen from multiple places? Or if you need to modify it at a later date, to, say, add another field?
For example: Say you have a login screen. And now you want to add a field to ask the user for another bit of information. With your design, you have to know everywhere that you can possibly log in from. Or, you have to add a method somewhere to set up the login view and then push it. And at that point, you might as well just make a separate controller to control everything. Which brings us back to tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:.
Right now, all you have to do is modify your root element as you wish, and then call the reloadData on the tableView. That will show the new table automatically, although it won't show a nice animation that somebody would expect. Adding this functionality is in my todo list, and should be fairly simple to do.
What you're saying though is not really related to adding/removing cells. I'm not saying you shouldn't create UIViewControllers for specific things, actually its quite the oposite, I think you should have as many controllers as possible, so that they're really small. Funny your example is a login screen, bcse that's the example in my samples on the project. Take a look at the code: it's very simple, and it mostly has to do with the actions that will happen as a result of the form, instead of cell creation: https://github.com/escoz/QuickDialog/blob/master/sample/Logi...
I see this as a much cleaner approach to do exactly the same thing, with the benefit that a lot of the code can be reusable. As a developer, you can spend a lot less time implementing plumbing code to get the cells and fields displayed, and instead focus on how they're used.
What you're saying though is not really related to adding/removing cells. I'm not saying you shouldn't create UIViewControllers for specific things, actually its quite the oposite, I think you should have as many controllers as possible, so that they're really small. Funny your example is a login screen, bcse that's the example in my samples on the project. Take a look at the code: it's very simple, and it mostly has to do with the actions that will happen as a result of the form, instead of cell creation: https://github.com/escoz/QuickDialog/blob/master/sample/Logi...
I see this as a much cleaner approach to do exactly the same thing, with the benefit that a lot of the code can be reusable. As a developer, you can spend a lot less time implementing plumbing code to get the cells and fields displayed, and instead focus on how they're used.
Looks fantastic! Great work.
Until i read "the library depends on ARC for memory management" - unfortunately that'll rule out its use for me :(
Having said that, i look forward to one-day-when i get to use this in an ARC app :)
The length of time the ARC compiler is in beta is a blink of an eye relative to how long all the production apps based on QuickDialog are going to be in production.
Good on him for writing a maintainable library, instead of one that will need a major refactor in 30 days.
Good on him for writing a maintainable library, instead of one that will need a major refactor in 30 days.
Thanks Drew,
I would love to have people using the library for months or years to come. I'm sure I'll still be using it. :)
I would love to have people using the library for months or years to come. I'm sure I'll still be using it. :)
Thanks Chubs! Adding retain/releases into the codebase wouldn't be too hard to do, but I created this for some new projects which won't be ready for another couple of months anyway, so by then 4.2 is going to be released already.
Thanks for the notification. I plan on pulling the code and trying it out!
(On another note, ARC is a very welcome addition to the language.)
(On another note, ARC is a very welcome addition to the language.)
Looks cool but if possible remove the dependence on ARC.
Unless you need to support iOS 3.x, you'll get ARC for free for your iOS 5.x _and_ iOS 4.x projects in September with Xcode 4.2 (currently in beta). ARC and non-ARC libraries can also co-exists in the same project.
So it seems quite logical for developers to rely on most modern technologies, esp. since supporting older technologies comes with a cost.
So it seems quite logical for developers to rely on most modern technologies, esp. since supporting older technologies comes with a cost.
Understood, but technically we're not supposed to submit to the App Store using beta versions of Xcode. Whether Apple would notice is a different story but a rejection would set us back so I'm not willing to risk it.
This isn't a technicality. Apple will reject your app if you compile with Xcode 4.2.
Not for long though, 4.2 is just around the corner. I can't see them doing too many extra betas before releasing it.
By the time you develop your app with this library 4.2 is probably going to be released anyway.
We're assuming 4.2 is going to be released soon. No one actually knows. It might be tomorrow, it might be October.
You're right.. but from previous experience, apple doesn't usually do a lot more than 5 or so beta builds.
Still, its not like I'm doing more work anyway, going with ARC saved time on development. If Apple ends up never releasing 4.2, I would just had to "finish" the job.
Still, its not like I'm doing more work anyway, going with ARC saved time on development. If Apple ends up never releasing 4.2, I would just had to "finish" the job.
What about if you just don't want to use Xcode 4.x, because it's (still) missing Xcode 3.2 feature(s) that you use on a daily basis? :)
Looks like a cool library though! Once they manage to make Xcode 4.x work as well as Xcode 3.2, I will try it.
Looks like a cool library though! Once they manage to make Xcode 4.x work as well as Xcode 3.2, I will try it.
Personally, I thing XCode sucks, either 3x or 4x. It's a really bad environment, I can't see how people use it or like it.
Have you tried AppCode, from JetBrains? Its still in beta, but its magnificent.
Have you tried AppCode, from JetBrains? Its still in beta, but its magnificent.
Thanks Marco. For now, I'm not really looking into doing manual memory management, as I don't have any need for it, but you're more than welcome to fork out the code and add it if you would like.
I did fork it and will be taking a look at it. Thanks for open-sourcing this. It really does look like it can be extremely useful.
You're moving the display logic for a view controller to be outside of the view controller. You now have to know where a view was created and presented from in order to change any of the view's content around at a later date. With tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:, you don't have to worry about where it came from, because the view controller is responsible for managing its own content.
Also: as an aside, you should be caching all of your NS*Formatter objects at a per-thread level, rather than recreating every time you need them -- formatters are very expensive to create and set up.