Pull down to refresh. [Code updated at the end of the article] I visited a Flex developer last week who’s developing an amazing Flex 4.5 application for tablet devices. We were talking about the classic mobile gestures on lists and the “pull down to refresh” behavior came up in the discussion. If you use the Twitter client on Android and on iOS, you can refresh the list of tweets by pulling down on the list. To reproduce this classic mobile behavior, I used a few tricks. First, I needed to catch in real-time the position of the list. Depending on the vertical scroll position, I display the “pull down to refresh” message. Then playing with the data provider of the list, and the item renderer, I display a “loading” busy indicator at the top of the list. The tricks First, to get the position of the scrollbar, just use the Scroller object attached to your list: List.scroller.verticalScrollBar.value returns the position (Check the optimized UPDATE at the end of the post). And that’s it.
[UPDATE] Code optimization. Extending LabelItemRenderer to look like iTunes on the iPad. How To Get More Productivity In An iOS UI Development Project. This is a guest post by Juri Vasylenko of Ramotion - one of the most skilled interface design and icons creation studios out there. If you ask any developer what is the most unlikeable task is, most of them would answer that it is the UI customization.
That’s an obvious point because developers are technical specializes and they like to solve logic task most then cut. PNG’s and build user interfaces. However, the GUI is the first thing that users see in the app, and largely, the applications success depends on how attractive app is. During the few lasts projects we have seen, that app user interface creation is the most time-consuming task, and we’ve been thinking how we can work on this task with more productivity in mind.
Borrowing experience from game development, where all the UI assets are stored in sprite sheets, we decided to try the same approach in UI-oriented app development. Here is an idea how it can work. AdWhirl.