As a courtesy, this is a full free rendering of my book, Programming iOS 6, by Matt Neuburg. Copyright 2013 Matt Neuburg. Please note that this book has now been completely superseded by two more recent books, iOS 7 Fundamentals and Programming iOS 7. If my work has been of help to you, please consider purchasing one or both of them. Thank you!

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Chapter 18. Touches  Table of Contents  Chapter 19. View Controllers

Part V. Interface

The previous part of the book introduced views. This part of the book is about the particular kinds of view provided by the Cocoa framework — the built-in “widgets” with which you’ll construct an app’s interface. These are surprising few, but impressively powerful.

  • Chapter 19 is about view controllers. View controllers are a brilliant mechanism for allowing an entire interface to be replaced by another; this ability is especially crucial on the iPhone’s small screen. They are also the basis of an app’s ability to compensate when the user rotates the device. In real life, every app you write will have its interface managed by view controllers. This chapter also discusses storyboards and segues (including unwind segues, new in iOS 6), and describes iOS 6’s new built-in mechanism for letting you save and restore the state of your view controllers between launches of your app.
  • Chapter 20 is about scroll views, the iOS mechanism for letting the user scroll and zoom the interface.
  • Chapter 21 explains table views, an extremely important and powerful type of scroll view that lets the user navigate through any amount of data, along with collection views, a generalization of table views new in iOS 6.
  • Chapter 22 is about two forms of interface unique to, and characteristic of, the iPad — popovers and split views.
  • Chapter 23 describes several ways of presenting text (including styled text) in an app’s interface — labels, text fields, text views, and text drawn manually with Core Text.
  • Chapter 24 discusses web views. A web view is a easy-to-use interface widget backed by the power of a full-fledged web browser. It can also be used to present a PDF and various other forms of data.
  • Chapter 25 describes all the remaining built-in iOS (UIKit) interface widgets.
  • Chapter 26 is about the forms of modal dialog that can appear in front of an app’s interface.
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Chapter 18. Touches  Table of Contents  Chapter 19. View Controllers