
Cocoa with Love: Showing a "Loading..." message over the iPhone keyboard - twampss
http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/04/showing-message-over-iphone-keyboard.html
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mathieu
Great post! I spent hours trying to do that this week-end, and I couldn't do
it. Thank you!

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slavox
It's good to see some smart thinking on the iPhone front, I find a lot of the
closed source software lacking in features due mainly to the uncompetitive
nature of the store..

"My app sells for 5$ with these features, Why add more when i can make another
app that also sells for 5$?"

But of course I don't wish for a flame war, I understand there are many good
developers on both sides, I just find this is a trend.

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ObieJazz
I find the app store to be highly competitive. The competition drives down
price, which drives down incentive for developers to put too much time into a
single app. This provides what many consumers are looking for on the device:
$0.99 apps that will entertain them 5 minutes.

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Zev
I don't like it.

Covering and uncovering the keyboard or screen mid-program is poor UX IMO. The
keyboard is too big of an object on screen, _too_ obvious, in an unhelpful
way. Why not hide the keyboard, grey out your input box and refuse to take
anything new until done processing and doing whatever it needs to do? Or move
to a new view that has your information? And a loading box over the screen
itself? Showing, hiding partially and then showing the _exact_ same screen
with little new information doesn't make sense and will confuse some users.

If you're doing an app for a website (as far as I can tell, this is the main
reason why a Loading view would pop up very often), why not look at Safari's
Web Apps. They are still _very good_ to use, and in some cases, will end up
being much better then a native app would have been. Not to mention, you can
distribute it however you like and not have to worry about the App Store.

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DenisM
Did this work for anybody? In simulator I see the keyboard on top of the
semitransparent view...

EDIT: Oh, I see it now. You have to type in some text and press blue button to
see the effect of keyboard being covered. Interestingly, keyboard is in its
own window which is one of the few cases where an iPhone app would have more
than one window at all (one other being alerts popups).

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smwhreyebelong
It's interesting I was thinking about the same thing a few days ago. Once you
release an app, there won't be a lot of motivation to keep releasing updates
to it ( no incentive for doing that ). Why not go and build another app ?

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bcl
Did you read the same article as I did? It was about displaying a loading
spinner over the top of the Apple keyboard. It is an interesting article and
I'm going to look into it a bit deeper. I wonder how Apple views their method
for enumerating the view objects to find the keyboard? They seem to be a bit
touchy about non-standard ways of doing things.

As far as updating your app goes, it is easier to update your current app to
attract new users and better reviews than it is to start a whole new project.
And some of us do take some pride in our work, so fixing bugs is a moral
imperative.

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allenbrunson
he's not using any undocumented methods for finding the keyboard, but he is
uncovering information that apple apparently doesn't want you to have, since
they don't provide a documented method for locating the keyboard. i'd say
that's a gray area. maybe they'd allow it, maybe not.

for finding the first responder, he's using an undocumented method. that's a
big no-no. they'd probably keep you out of the app store if they noticed that
one.

