Question

I’m totally new with iOS development, having background with ActionScript3 with MVC. I love to code and I don’t want to use any NIB/XIB files for my project (I’ve been told I will learn Objective C faster then) and I’m looking for a good example of iOS application using MVC pattern from scratch.
I know there is a bunch of good examples (like Good example code for Objective-C) but I haven’t found any with no NIB/XIB usage.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

I’ll try to give you some guidelines.

First of all. If you need some good tutorials, I suggest you to watch Brad Larson or Standford courses on iTunes. They are absolutely fantastic.

Then, if you want to create your MVC from scratch, I suggest you to take a look at UIViewController class reference.

Each UIViewController is a controller as the name suggest. The model could be contained in the controller itself (e.g. a NSArray) or provided by an “external” entity (e.g. Core Data). Each controller has a view property. The view is that element that is presented on screen. Usually could be provided by XIB or Storyboard files. As the apple documentation suggested:

If you cannot define your views in a storyboard or a nib file,
override the loadView method to manually instantiate a view hierarchy
and assign it to the view property.

In other words, within your view controller class you need to add this:

- (void)loadView
{  
   UIView* myCustomView = ...
   self.view = myCustomView;
}

By means of this, you have a full control of the view presented on screen. This means that you need to provide the sizing and the positioning of the elements of your view. While a similar arrangement can be done by means of an user friendly interface in XIB or Storyboard files, you need to do it manually in other cases (e.g. deal with frame, autosizing mask, etc.).

Hope it helps.