Paneque's Technology Blog

One the first entry of this series I covered the issues with the keyboard in iOS not hiding automatically when needed. In this second - and final - entry on the subject I am going to go for the most of annoying issue when creating UIs in iOS. The keyboard overlaps a focused TextField  If you have a TextField below the keyboard top edge position, they will be hidden once the keyboard shows up. The keyboard size is 320x216 points* in in portrait mode, so anything below the 264 (iPhone 4/4s) or 352 (iPhone 5/5s) points won’t be visible.  It is so simple that is almost unbelievable, but it happens as you can see in the images. Since this default behavior is inconvenient we are going for the workaround. The solution is not pretty but it is trivial: we need to place the UI elements inside a UIScrollView  and will use notifications to monitor when the keyboard will Show/Hide and will scroll the content of the container to ensure that views inside are always vis...

Popular wisdom says "things happen for a reason". However experience has proved me that when it comes to programmers, that is not always true. Things can just happen for no reason at all. That's why we require feedback, here is one and I assure you is in good spirit. So let's me write about something I found when building an app for iOS using Xamarin/Mono. The invisible property. Ranging from windows forms (desktop or Windows Mobile) to WPF, Silverlight/XAML on the web or windows phone. ASP.NET Web Forms or Razor, MVC or classic. One thing I can say for sure: any visual element  has a way to check for its visual status. Call it "Visible" in windows forms, "Visibility" in Silverlight/WPF. There is always an intuitive, simple and trivial way to know if something - that might be visible - it is visible at a particular moment or not. You can't imagine my surprise when I realized that the UIViewController in iOS does not provide such mecha...