One of the things we do is emulate the UIMenuController with our own more powerful view controller. And one of the neat things about a UIMenuController is that you get a slick, subtle drop shadow wherever it is placed. Being the guy I am I spent some time to analyze the drop shadow in Photoshop and do my best to emulate it. Here’s what I came up with. Have a better solution? Tell me in the comments!

- (void) viewDidLoad
{
	[super viewDidLoad];

	self.view.layer.shadowColor = [[UIColor blackColor] CGColor];
	self.view.layer.shadowOffset = CGSizeMake(0, 2.0f);
	self.view.layer.shadowOpacity = .55f;
	self.view.layer.shadowRadius = 2.0f;
	self.view.layer.shouldRasterize = YES;
}

See what I’m saying? Fade out what isn’t important, lighten all matches, put some special pizazz on the current item. As an added bonus each time you switch the current item it “pops” a bit to help pull your eye to where the next item is. Pretty slick.

I set out not to duplicate the styles but to get a feel for CSS3 animation and transitions. With that in mind the animation tweens and colors aren’t exact but they’ll work for the project I have in mind. If you have improvements go ahead and share them in the comments.

[Ninja edit] I forgot to mention that in order for CSS transformations to be hardware accelerated by devices that do so you have to include the “translate3d” property. If you don’t need to translate, use the meaningless zeroed out setting like I did below.

[Ninja edit 2} Also, I didn’t bother putting in all the different vendor prefixes. If you’re interested in this code your Google-fu will be strong enough to look up the different vendor settings and adjust accordingly.

@-webkit-keyframes pulseFocusedOverlay {
	0%, 100% {
		-webkit-transform: scale(1) translate3d(0px, 0px, 0px);;
	}
	15% {
		-webkit-transform: scale(1.35) translate3d(0px, 0px, 0px);;
	}
}

.searchMatch {
	display: inline-block;
	padding: 0 4px;
	margin: 0 -3px;
	-webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 5px #333;
	box-shadow: 0 1px 5px #333;
	color: #222;
	background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left bottom, left top, color-stop(.5, rgb(222, 222, 222)), color-stop(1, rgb(255, 255, 255)));
}

.searchMatch_selected {
	display: inline-block;
	padding: 0 4px;
	border-radius: 5px;
	border: 1px solid #EFDB13;
	margin: -1px -4px;
	-webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 3px #333;
	box-shadow: 0 1px 5px #333;
	color: #000;
	-webkit-animation: pulseFocusedOverlay 185ms ease-in-out 0;
	background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, left bottom,left top,color-stop(.5, rgb(238, 207, 0)),color-stop(1, rgb(242, 237, 19)));
}

While able to run in 64-bit, I was running Apache in 32-bit mode under my Leopard install. This is because the ODBC drivers I was running from Actual Technologies only supported 32-bit Apache. In Leopard land that was fine. Now that I’m in Snow Leopard and everything else is in 64-bit I thought my ODBC drivers ought be as well.

My problem is that I had the 32-bit Actual Technologies drivers, compiled in the FreeTDS drivers for my MSSQL support when compiling PHP and then installed a 64-bit beta build from Actual Technologies. Somewhere between the Snow Leopard upgrade and all these other installs things have gone a bit wonky. Best bet is to clean out all ODBC drivers and start anew.

Small hiccup: Actual Technologies does not provide an uninstaller. Well, not that you’d be able to find. I emailed their support and received a link to a script bundled up in a dmg. By request I’m not going to post a link to the script or the script itself and I think that’s fair. Looking at the script it is no more than a series of rm -rf commands that blindly erase whole directories. Even existing iODBC data and settings you may have from other products or drivers.

I’m going to run the uninstaller, recompile FreeTDS, rebuild PHP and see where that gets me. Hopefully not towards a fresh Snow Leopard install.