Question

My universal app has a settings page, wherein the user must choose a theme from a dozen available themes.

Problem is, if I am using a picker-view, it takes up most of the screen on an iPhone.

I think what I want is something like your standard Windows drop-down menu, where it just displays on a single line the current selection, and clicking it expands into a scrollable list of possible items. Selecting an item collapses the list back into the original form.

So my question is: What is my best method for handling this situation? Can anyone point me to pictures or code examples of how this situation is handled successfully?

EDIT:
This is the behaviour I’m looking for:

• only the currently selected profile is displayed
• when the user taps on this, it expands into a list
• when the user selects an item (or taps outside of the view) it collapses back to its original form, now displaying the new selection

ie functionally equivalent to a dropdown.

Answer 1

Firstly, this question is a duplicate of:

(not much good) Picker view as subview

(same) How to make an iPhone dropdown-looking button

(better) How to create drop down list box for an iphone app

(even better) Creating a drop-down list in iPhone app

(that last one links to some handy code)

Secondly, Google image search for ‘dropdown control iphone’ restricting the image size to 320×480 shows how everyone is doing this.

Basically a picker view scrolls in from the bottom, the same way as the keyboard does.