Question

before developping iPhone applications, i thought that any time the iPhone was doing network access, it started the Activity Indicator.
Now that i’m learning to make applications, i understand that it’s not the case. The network activity indicator only appears when we decide to make it appear, even if there is no network at all.

Just stop me if i’m wrong.

If i’m not, is there a way to be sure the network is being used by my application or not ?

I’m doing an app based on Evernote SDK and when i launch a Evernote creation, i’m not using any NSURLConnection or things like that and i can’t be sure whether it’s downloading or uploading stuff. When should i start the Activity Indicator ? and when should i stop it ?

Are there rules ? are there standard methods to know that ?

Thanks

Answer 1

There are not strict rules about usage of Activity Indicator. You should use indicator to tell user that actually something happens in background.

For example if you are creating app that need to search using some web service, user enters keyword and presses button, there you contact the server, server returns the result and new view with search result is presented. Pay attention at moment when you tap the search button, if you dont show activity indicator, user may think that search is not performed, and he will try to press several more times until he become nervous and closes our app. If we show activity indicator user will know that search is performing in background and he will be patient and he will wait for the results.

There are some scenarios where you have network communication, but you dont show activity indicator. For example application that sends gps location to server, on every location update. Here you dont want user to know when network communication occurs because it is unnecessary and may become frustrating during the time.