Question

I am primarily a web developer (ruby, python) that is new to iPhone development. I’ve done some desktop development in the past within the MS environment (C#), but never anything on the mac.

I’m trying to build a really simple iPhone application and I am confused by the way that views work in general. If someone can provide advice for my particular problem, along with some resources where I can learn how to architect iPhone views in the future, that would be awesome. I feel like a lot of the Apple documentation that I’ve come across is too specific – I am lacking a fundamental understanding of how views work on the iPhone.

My particular problem looks like this:

I need one view that displays some downloaded text content. This is the view that shows when the app loads, and it is pretty straightforward.

Then I need a settings area (I’ve already decided I don’t want to use the iPhone settings area). The settings area main page will have some text fields on it. It will also have a 2-row grouped table. Each cell in that table will take you to another view which also has a grouped table used for multi-select. I suspect that I can reuse the same view for these two final “detailed setting” views.

In summary:

• home page
• settings main page
  • detailed setting 1
  • detailed setting 2

Any help and advice appreciated.

Answer 1

It sounds like you already have a good idea of what you want each of your screens to look like; that’s a good place to start.

What you’re probably going to want to do is use Interface Builder to lay out the objects in each view (textfields, buttons, etc.), and then have a custom View Controller (subclass of UIViewController) for each view. You would then navigate to a new view by doing something like:

MySettingsController *controller = [[MySettingsController alloc]
    initWithNibName:@"SettingsView" bundle:nil];
[[self navigationController] pushViewController:controller animated:YES];

(assuming a navigation-based app).

If you haven’t yet, I recommend reading Apple’s View Controller Programming Guide