SPStackedNav
Nevyn Bengtsson nevyn.jpg@gmail.com
SPStackedNavigationController
SPStackedNavigationController is a UINavigationController drop-in replacement, which represents its content in stacks of panes, rather than one at a time. This interface trend was started by Loren Brichter in Tweetie for iPad, and has spread to many apps in many variations since.
There are two main advantages to this approach:
- You can display two pieces of main content at once, allowing you to navigate in one while using content in the other.
- Navigation is direct instead of indirect, which is faster and more intuitive to use. You actually grab the UI and pull it to where you want it. In contrast, a standard navigation controller requires you to find and tap a button with an abstract "back" concept.
The main drawback is that you should no longer use horizontal gestures within view controllers, as they will interfere with navigation, or the other way around. This is already true in UINavigationController since iOS 7 though.
In our implementation, a page can either be "full size" and thus cover the whole width of the parent container (which we use for the root view controllers in our stacks), or half-size (exactly two will fit in landscape, or one and a half in portrait).
Spotify used to use this style for navigation in their iPad app. This code was used for several years at Spotify and should be considered very stable. In 2017, Spotify stopped using it internally, and I (Nevyn, the original author of the class) am maintaining this fork in their stead.
SPSideTabController
In addition, SPSideTabController is a drop-in replacement for UITabBarController, but with tabs along the left side rather than along the bottom. This is one of the UIs that are commonly combined with a stacked navigation.
Extra tab bar items can be added along the bottom (e g for "Settings"), and the whole bottom of the screen can have an attachment, which we use to show the currently playing track in Spotify.
Usage Instructions
Use CocoaPods, or...
- Pull in "include", "Sources" and "Graphics" into your main project.
- Go to your project settings, then Build Settings for your app target, and change "Header Search Paths" to include and "{your path to SPStackedNav}/include".
-
import <SPStackedNav/SPStackedNav.h> either from your prefix header, or the source file where you want to use these classes.
See Examples/StackExample for some example usage.
Version History
1.0: Initial release