QuickLook

 
11
Jul
2012
 

A Better Fullscreen Asset Viewer with QuickLook

by Matt Long

Since last year I’ve spent a lot of time working on iPad apps for medical device companies. These companies want to be able to display their sales materials/digital assets to potential buyers on the iPad because of its gorgeous presentation. We can’t blame them. This is a great choice especially with the retina display on the third generation iPad. It’s incredibly compelling.

Our go-to solution for presenting these files until recently has been to just load everything into a UIWebView because it supports so many formats. Voila! Done! We like simple solutions to problems that would otherwise be very difficult.

This solution has worked great, but over time it’s become a noticeably dull spot in the app with some UX problems to boot. This is not good–especially for the part of the app that gets the most customer face time. It needs to shine. To go fullscreen, we just load a full size view controller modally. One issue with this approach though was that it only worked in landscape. For some reason it would get wonky (engineering parlance for, “um, I don’t know”) if we allowed both orientations since the rest of the app supported landscape only. It also had a nav bar that would never be hidden, so the user would always see it even when they were scrolling through the document content. Finally, there was no way to jump down deep into a document. If you needed to get to page 325, for example, you had to scroll all the way there. That’s just a bad user experience–incredibly tedious making it unlikely anyone would use it with a large document. These were some significant drawbacks and I didn’t have a good solution to bring the polish that this segment of the app deserved. (more…)