Question

I’d like to create a small overlay view that would float on top of all the others. I need the view to accept touches and I need it to stay in place even during transitions between the underlying views. What I have tried so far:

1. Standalone view inserted into the key UIWindow. The obvious downside is that the view is not attached to any view controller, which means handling (at least?) rotation events by hand.

2. UIViewController containment, have a “root” view controller that would contain the floating view and all navigation would be done underneath it. This is very much a “first-class-citizen” solution, but presenting a modal view controller overlaps the floating view.

3. Second UIWindow with a root view controller containing the floating view. This goes against Apple recommendations and I had some trouble filtering which events should go to which window.

Does anyone have a working solution that doesn’t require too much brittle hacking?

Answer 1

In the end I have followed Jonathan’s suggestion and implemented the overlay as a separate view inserted into the key window. The view has an associated controller object (a subclass of NSObject, not UIViewController), and this controller takes care of the rotation logic. That way the view implementing the actual overlay object doesn’t need to care about rotation events at all.