Making an iOS app look like one

[Graham Samuel]

Folks, I know this is a desperately naive question, but as I progress with my first serious attempt at an iOS app, which I’m trying to do in a hurry with only my experience of developing LC desktop apps to go on, I am struck by how un-iOS-like it looks. Richard Gaskin has already suggested that I look for good practice amongst existing apps from all sources, and I’ve tried to do this. Where I come unstuck is how to imitate the ‘look’ of such apps.

I am trying, for example by getting the Native Control Widget pack from the LC store, and by attempting (but not so far succeeding) to understand the LC lesson about Native text controls, especially how I can create such controls in the first place.

My app is not outrageously complicated. What it needs is

  -  Fields to display information, some of which must allow input via keyboard or pasting. Although there is a Native Android Field widget, there isn’t one for iOS, so I don’t know what my options are. I want the kind of fonts and font sizes that are typical of iOS, but so far I haven’t found a reference to these properties in the LC documentation. I found a command, mobileControlCreate, which it appears can only function dynamically in a mobile app, which seems to mean I can’t create and place controls until the app is running. I find that confusing.

  -  Small, tidy icons, for use as the equivalent of menus or menu items, for example acting as links to various settings cards - so typically an image like a cogwheel for example. I would like these to be SVG, but none of LC’s SVG images have the necessary unchunky look. Do I have to create them from scratch (it would not be the end of the world if I did, but I imagine that there’s a library of them somewhere).

  -  “Done” type buttons (there is a built in widget for this but it doesn’t end up looking like the ‘done’ buttons I see on typical apps) and other buttons to start off processes or displays.

  -  Some kind of control that acts like a radio button group, so that one option is chosen to the exclusion of any others in the group (I suppose it’s a picking list, but I don’t know how to implement such a thing in an iOS-compatible way and the widgets on offer are specialised to date and time)

LC Support has been helpful in pointing me at various lessons, but I have obviously missed masses of stuff which must be there somewhere. As usual I am searching for pointers and examples in order to try to fast track this development.

Sorry for asking yet more questions.

Graham