Macro Recording in iOS

Question

Is it possible to record set of touch events on iPhone and then playback? I have searched alot but could not find any answer. if its possible, can anyone explain with an example. I m not looking for testing purpose. Within my application, instead of creating animation, i just want to record set of events and then want to playback to explain the app flow to the users.

Regards.

Answer 1

Recording is pretty simple. Look at the various "Responding to Touch Events" and "Responding to Motion Events" methods on UIResponder. Just create your own UIView subclass (since UIView inherits from UIResponder) and keep a copy of the events passed into the relevant methods.

Playback is a bit more complicated; there's no way to make UITouch or UIEvent objects (so you can't make a fake event and pass it on to -[UIApplication sendEvent:]). But, there's nothing stopping you from manually parsing an array of Event objects and handling it on your own (aside from it being some kind of ugly code).

Answer 2

There's no built-in macro capability, but you could certainly build that ability into your application. You'll need to do more than just play back events, though. Touches aren't normally visible, but if you're trying to explain how to use your app to the user you'll probably want to have some sort of visual representation for the touches that trigger different responses similar to the way the iOS Simulator uses white dots to represent multiple touches when you hold down the option key.

Assuming that you can solve that problem, two strategies for easily recording user actions come to mind:

• Use the Undo Manager: NSUndoManager is already set up to "record" undoable events. If you invest some time into making everything in your app undoable, you could (maybe) perform a set of actions, undo them all to move them to the redo stack, and then save the events in the redo stack as your script.

• Use Accessibility: The Accessibility framework sends notifications whenever user interface elements are touched. Your app could use those notifications to create a playback script. You'll still need to write the code to play back the events in the script, though.