Question

I’m running into problems when dealing with a large amount of UIButtons in my interface. I was wondering if anyone had first hand experience with this and how they did it?

When dealing with 30-80 buttons most simple, a couple of complex do you just use UIButton or do something different like drawRect, respond to touch events and get the coordinates of the touch event?

Best example is a calendar, similar to that of Apples Calendar App. Would you just draw most of the days using drawRect and then when you click a button replace it with an image or just use UIButtons? It’s not so much the memory footprint or creating the buttons, just strange things are happening with them sometimes (previous question about it) and having performance issues animating them.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

If “strange things are happening” with your buttons, you need to get to the bottom of why. Switching architectures just to avoid a problem that you don’t understand (and might crop up again) doesn’t sound like a good idea.

-drawRect: works by drawing to a bitmap-backed context. This happens when -displayIfNeeded is called after -setNeedsDisplay (or doing something else that implicitly sets the needsDisplay flag, like resizing a view with contentMode = UIContentModeRedraw). The bitmap-backed context is then composited to screen.

Buttons work by putting the different components (background image, foreground image, text) in different layers. The text is drawn when it changes and composited to the screen; the images are just composited directly to the screen.

The “best” way to do things is usually a combination of the two. For example, you might draw text and a background image in -drawRect: so the different layers didn’t need to be composited at render time (you get an additional speedup if your view is “opaque”). You probably want to avoid full-screen animations via drawRect: (and it won’t integrate so well with CoreAnimation), since drawing tends to be more expensive than compositing.

But first, I’d find out what’s going wrong with UIButton. There’s little point worrying about how you could make things faster until you actually find out what the slow bits are. Write code so that it is easy to maintain. UIButton is not that expensive and -drawRect: is not that bad (presumably it’s even better if you use -setNeedsDisplayInRect: for a smallish rect, but then you need to calculate the rect…), but if you want a button, use UIButton.