Unintrusive way to alert user of an event

[chrisch]

I'm working on a universal app that was originally written just for the iPhone. On the iPhone I found a simple way to notify users of events (e.g., something was submitted, something was saved, etc.) in a non-intrusive way. What I do is use a UIActionSheet without buttons to present some text, and have it dismiss itself after ~1.2s. This is great for any little status updates that don't require user acknowledgment (by tapping an OK button or something). I would almost compare it to a Growl notification on OSX, where messages are displayed for a few seconds before being dismissed.

I'm now trying to do something similar with the iPad and am short on ideas. One app I like that does something is Twitteriffic, which displays notification messages underneath the toolbar. Does anyone know how they do this, or perhaps another approach to accomplish something similar?

[bytor99999]

You could always use UINotification and the notification center. It is actually pretty easy to use. Or KVO, Key Value Observation

You have some event that sends a Notification to the notification center. You have another object there registers with the notification center for that notification. When the event sends the notification the other object receives it.
This other object could be a view controller that has a reference to a UILabel or a UILabel on a toolbar, and when it receives notification it changes the UILabel to the text.

With KVO, you call

[myObject setObserver:someObject forKey:@"propertyName" ...]

Now the property changes and the someObject gets a message to a method. The method is a delegate type method, I forget the name of the method, but you class has to implement it to receive messages when that property changes.

Also, check the apis, but there is a method that you can call that will call a method after a period of time your supply. In the method that handles the notification or observing method at the end could call this method to call another method after say a second to clear out the UILabel.

Mark

[chrisch]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your reply. I'm familiar with how to generate the notifications (via UINotification or manually), but I'm more interested in the user interface side of things. The UIActionSheet solution is great since it slides up the text in the UI and then slides it off after a short elapsed time. I'm trying to figure out how to do something similar on the iPad (similar to what Twitteriffic does). Cheers.