Back in the first article in this series we created a BRControl wrapper around the ProgressBar widget. I said then that we would put this to use shortly, and so we will. In today’s tutorial we will look at a more substantive example of plugin development, including localizations and resources, some preferences, and asynchronous download from the internet. Our end result will be a controller which downloads from a URL stored in our preferences, displaying the progress of the download as it does so. It will also show a method for supporting resumption of an interrupted download.

Download the sample code for this tutorial.

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In the the second article in this series, we used a simple animation, the fade-in. The animations available can be more complex than that, however, even without creating a custom BRAnimation subclass. In this short walk-through, we’ll replace the fade-in animation with a grander swooping image animation. As with the last article, a sample project will be included at the end.

Download the sample code for this tutorial.

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In our second tutorial we’ll pull back a little and cover the BRLayerController class, and what you can do with it. If this isn’t your first experience with Back Row plugins, then you’re probably already familiar with the BRMenuController or BRMediaMenuController, but those are both fairly specialized subclasses. By creating our own BRLayerController subclasses we can define our own content and layout in a more comprehensive manner.

Along the way we will also take a look at an anciliary class, BRImageManager, which enables us to dynamically download and cache images from the Internet, or indeed from any URL, remote or local, and we will see how to use the BRHeaderControl and BRImageControl classes.

By the end of this tutorial, we will have created a custom controller that will download an image in the background and display it when ready.

Download the sample code for this tutorial.

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This article presents the first of what I hope will be a growing number of more in-depth tutorials on the Back Row system, gleaned through lots of repetitive experimentation. I will be specifically concentrating on the creation of custom control and controllers, and a look at the layer and animation systems. In doing so, we will learn some of the internals of the system itself, such as the use of the BRImageManager class and some less-used BRControllerStack functions. […]