I am working on an app for tracking Bacarat bets and have a question on the Native UI Library
Like in a lot of apps, I have a list of entries, people betting on the Bacarat table in my case. I need to add and remove players from the list as they come and go from the table. Clearly this needs to be pretty slick as it will happen all of the time. I think it would be nice to have the typical iOS ‘slide to get a delete button to appear’ and the little + button to add a new one. Is this easy if I’m using native UI?
If this is an iOS only app then ‘slide to get a delete button’ makes sense. If it is cross platform then that UI scheme would be unfamiliar to other users.
Take Windows Phone for example, sliding on most screens takes you to the next page (on a Panorama or Pivot).
Dynamically changing a page’s content is working to some extent, but is actually about to undergo some more development (as I understand it). I think a solution for now might be to have an icon in each list item (probably within a table) so that you can check individual players. At the bottom of the list (or housed somewhere else, within the toolbar or in a fixed container) you could have a ‘Remove Checked’ button. Much like the email app on an iPhone.
Like I say though, this is coming from a cross-platfrom standpoint. For iOS only it would be different.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you - we’ve been in feature / roadmap planning meetings over the last couple of days.
Regarding the NUI, as Glenn noted some other notable native apps on iOS do not use swipe delete either, so I don’t think the exclusion of it is ‘wrong’, simply one possible feature that is not present. If you are interested in writing native code, you could implement this addition into your Mobile Designer project, thereby offering up this possibility even if other devices do not support it. This is the key point of our ability to go beyond lowest common denominator.
When you are simply working against the cross-platform (Java driven) APIs though, these have been designed with multi platform compliance in mind. What you are asking for is a feature that is not cross-platform and so not part of that library. Obviously, we have no intention of wrapping every API call on every platform in a Java wrapper, so there will always be some native tasks whose implementation requires native code. The point is, though, that you can write that native code and integrate it using Mobile Designer.