Creating a card based UI in iOS

Question

Im trying to do app with a card based ui, kind of like Jelly. I was wondering the how this would be done. Im thinking by using a collection view but Im not sure. Are there any open source libraries that would make it easier to do this? Thanks.

Answer 1

You're probably not going to be able to accomplish this using out-of-the-box components. I don't think UICollectionView is going to get you very far. You will almost certainly need to roll your own.

I would start by creating a View Controller class for the "cards", instantiate a few of them, add the views as subviews to the main view, and get to the point where you can comfortably push these cards around with your fingers. You will want to read up on animating UIViews , and UIGestureRecognizers . Make sure the momentum is right. Apps like this really really demand highly-tuned physics, otherwise they'll feel awkward.

Once you get to the point where your cards are happily zipping around the screen, it's just a matter of getting them to "sink" into a couple pre-defined positions (focused front-and-center, and resting in a stack down below). You would probably also want to give your view controllers some sort of state that indicates whether they're "active", or not.

Easier said than done, obviously.