Friday, July 20, 2012

Cory vs. UITableView

As I continue my adventure into iPhone development I have struggled a bit with the UITableView concepts.

Tables and lists in Android seem to be much more straight forward and in the end I had to do a lot of reading to figure out how to make a basic scrolling list of data in Objective-C.

First I started reading tutorials:
http://iosdeveloperzone.com/2011/05/09/using-uitableview/

But that will only get you so far. The problem with tutorials is the confusion of IB changes and various patterns of clicking that must be accomplished to link the correct IBOutlets to the cells and other details.

So I did more Googling and found some additional tutorials:
http://www.edumobile.org/iphone/iphone-programming-tutorials/how-to-add-uiimage-and-uilabel-in-the-uitableview/

The tutorials gets you close enough to have some code running but for the most part it just crashed a lot.

This second source of details was really useful and was more of a guide than a tutorial:
http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/04/easy-custom-uitableview-drawing.html

Eventually I had to go back to the basics and try to understand how UITableView and UIView get along. As usual, when you go back to the basics you end up on Apple's documentation site:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/WindowsViews/Conceptual/ViewPG_iPhoneOS/WindowsandViews/WindowsandViews.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009503-CH2-SW1

I am still trying to wrap my mind around the translation of concepts between Android and iOS and the resulting map is a mass of confusion. As I build a better understanding of the two operating systems and SDK I will continue to post mapping blogs.

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