On the first run of an application we have developed there is a one time trade off. It has to do an initial large pull of custom content for the specific logged in user. This data refresh becomes largely unnoticed after the inital first time login as we have a system of pulling the content in the background as we populate the views with cached data, and then update as the data comes down from our web service.
What we want to try and do is create placeholders similar to the ones Facebook use (web examples here). I've been looking at a xamarin component called 'shimmer' in order to create the effect, so that's not necessarily an issue (Shimmer found here). Although it would be nice to break down that component into the basics so I don't have to integrate the control into my source code.
What I'm struggling with is how to go about implementing this correctly. My thoughts so far for pages that contain UITableViews are that I could create a replica of a single cell, add the shimmer effect and simply hide the header when the table loads. However I can't do the same for the UICollectionView, so I could overlay a cell at the uppermost Y co-ordinate of the UICollectionView and simply show and hide it when the views loading/loaded. There's plenty of ways I think I can implement this, but I am honestly stumped as to what is going to make the most sense, and be the most manageable. I'm looking for advice, tips, really just some constructive input.