Dear internet: I have been searching for a UIProgressHUD replacement for many, many months. Why have you failed me? I don’t suppose it was because of that other, similarly named UIProgressHUD replacement? Which I am not going to link to or name, because it sucks. Sorry, yes I am a jerk, but it does. If I have to explain to you why it’s a bad idea to make a progress view that’s launching background tasks, then there is no helping you.
Clik here to view.
UIProgressHUD
So, anyway. In case you’re new to this. UIKit has a nice control called UIProgressHUD for displaying a heads-up, semi-transparent view with a spinny-control on it, and a single line of text. It looks good, it works well, it’s easy. The only down side is that it’s undocumented, so you can’t use it in apps destined for the App Store.
I used UIProgressHUD in a project I was writing for a client a few months ago. This particular app was not destined for the App Store, so it seemed like a nice shortcut. Maybe that’s not such a hot idea, but they weren’t paying much, so I couldn’t justify a detour for writing a brand-new view. But now here I am again, needing the exact same thing for my card game, and google searches still only turn up that progress view that thinks it’s an app launcher. Hrmph. Time to write my own, I guess.
Clik here to view.
WBProgressHUD
My goal was to write an exact, drop-in replacement for that view I can’t use. I’ve included screenshots of Apple’s original view, and my clone view. Pretty darn close, don’t you think? The only real differences are details that I don’t want to change. For example, I think they picked a font size that’s a bit excessive.
It would be great if I could just paste the source file and header file right into this post, for your amusement. My view is mercifully short, and would lend itself to that. Alas, it requires several support modules, so I had to make it into an example Xcode project. I’ve developed a huge library of iPhone support code by this point, so it doesn’t make sense to duplicate things in every single view and controller I write.
One clever feature of my demo project: you can change one line of code and it will use either UIProgressHUD or my own WBProgressHUD. No other code has to change, because the two views are that similar, dawg. It makes for a good test bed for developing a clone view such as this one.
Download wbprogresshud.zip by clicking here. If you like this project, how about hiring me to write more stuff like it? My contact details are on my About page.
