How to Create the Highlight/Note Popup Buttons from the iPhone Kindle

Question

I am wondering how Amazon did the highlight/note popup buttons in the Kindle app. After reading about UIPasteboard, UIMenuController, UIResponder, and UIResponderStandardEditActions, I am able to turn on or off standard edit actions (i.e. copy, cut, paste, select, and selectAll). However I haven't found a way to add a custom action yet. I would really appreciate it if I could get a pointer.

Thanks in advance!

Chris

_{(source: sampletheweb.com)}

Edited by balexandre (added image instead link)

Answer 1

It looks like Amazon implemented their own custom view that mimicked the appearance of UIMenuController. I believe they did this rather than use SPI because if you click and hold on the Highlight cell, the arrow does not highlight, when it does in the real UIMenuController.

Answer 2

I don’t think there is a public interface to these controls, you’d probably have to code them yourself. (Or maybe figure out the private API, but that’s a slippery slope.) I am not sure about that, though, maybe somebody will prove me wrong.

Answer 3

That's a good point about the arrow part of the Notes/Highlight popup menu not highlighting, so they must be implementing their own.

However they are also obviously using a UIWebView, because it's recognizing tap and hold and they can highlight the text, and you can't get touch events from a UIWebView, much less get the information about what's selected. So how are they doing that?

This would be very useful for us to be able to do as well.

Answer 4

Use DTMenuController http://www.drobnik.com/touch/2010/01/dr-touchs-parts-store/

Costs 100 EUR ^_^

Answer 5

Custom menu items can be added via the UIMenuController's menuItems property. See Apple's UIMenuController docs.

Answer 6

the javascript part can be managed with jQuery, that's a fair simple and powerful library. i'm using it for resizing and rearranging things in a webview and it works great :)