I tried a slightly different approach to prevent UIWebView objects from scrolling and bouncing: adding a gesture recognizer to override other gestures.
It seems, UIWebView or its scroller subview uses its own pan gesture recognizer to detect user scrolling. But according to Apple's documentation there is a legitimate way of overriding one gesture recognizer with another. UIGestureRecognizerDelegate protocol has a method gestureRecognizer:shouldRecognizeSimultaneouslyWithGestureRecognizer: - which allows to control the behavior of any colliding gesture recognizers.
So, what I did was
in the view controller's viewDidLoad method:
// Install a pan gesture recognizer // We ignore all the touches except the first and try to prevent other pan gestures
// by registering this object as the recognizer's delegate
UIPanGestureRecognizer *recognizer;
recognizer = [[UIPanGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self action:@selector(handlePanFrom:)];
recognizer.delegate = self;
recognizer.maximumNumberOfTouches = 1;
[self.view addGestureRecognizer:recognizer];
self.panGestureFixer = recognizer;
[recognizer release];
then, the gesture override method:
// Control gestures precedence
- (BOOL)gestureRecognizer:(UIGestureRecognizer *)gestureRecognizer
shouldRecognizeSimultaneouslyWithGestureRecognizer:(UIGestureRecognizer *)otherGestureRecognizer
{
// Prevent all panning gestures (which do nothing but scroll webViews, something we want to disable in
// the most painless way)
if ([otherGestureRecognizer isKindOfClass:[UIPanGestureRecognizer class]])
{
// Just disable every other pan gesture recognizer right away
otherGestureRecognizer.enabled = FALSE;
}
return NO;
}
Of course, this delegate method can me more complex in a real application - we may disable other recognizers selectively, analyzing otherGestureRecognizer.view and making decision based on what view it is.
And, finally, for the sake of completeness, the method we registered as a pan handler:
- (void)handlePanFrom:(UIPanGestureRecognizer *)recognizer
{
// do nothing as of yet
}
it can be empty if all we want is to cancel web views' scrolling and bouncing, or it can contain our own code to implement the kind of pan motions and animations we really want...
So far I'm just experimenting with all this stuff, and it seems to be working more or less as I want it. I haven't tried to submit any apps to iStore yet, though. But I believe I haven't used anything undocumented so far... If anyone finds it otherwise, please inform me.