iOS Share Dialog?

Question

I'm curious, is the standard "Share" dialog you see throughout a lot of iOS apps a standard SDK dialog or is everyone just mimicking the ones that Apple created for their apps like Safari? Or perhaps everyone is using ShareKit?

For instance, on iPhone you get a nice 3/4 modal dialog which does a vertical cover appearance, containing a bunch of shiny buttons:

While on iPad you see a "speech bubble" type dialog appear:

This seems too standard across apps to just be coincidence/people ripping off the look and feel.

Answer 1

The situation you presented in this specific case is caused by the fact that on iPad, the UIActionSheet is always presented within a popover controller, and on the iPhone it displays as in your example, withouth a Popover Controller (which is only available on the iPad)

Answer 2

I've written my own code for sharing using Facebook's SDK and the iOS5 Twitter integration so I've never used it but I believe there is a library you can use called ShareKit that will create the action sheets and sharing capability that you'd like. The "up-to-date"/"2.0" (I believe the original is no longer maintained) version is available here: https://github.com/ShareKit/ShareKit

Answer 3

Apple provides the tools to make UI objects. The one you are looking at is "UIActionSheet". Developers can bind methods to the tap events of the actionsheet.

Apple encourages developers to keep a consistent UI in order to make the overall use easier on the user.

Check out the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.

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