Cocoa Touch™ for iPhone® OS 3

Chapter 12. Working with Other Controls

In This Chapter

Working with different kinds of components in your UI

Using a UISlider to take variable value input from the user

Using a UITabBar to control a set of view controllers

Configuring a UIPickerView

You've seen how to create your own custom UIViews. You've also seen how to work with some of the basic controls. In this chapter, you'll take a look at some of the other controls that are available in Cocoa Touch and then see how you can use some of those controls in your application.

The important thing to remember is that Cocoa tends to use the same design patterns over and over again. This means that if you learn how to work with a few controls, it makes working with all of the controls easier. In particular, you'll notice extensive use of the delegate pattern and the data source pattern in most of these controls.

This is one of the things that make Cocoa and Cocoa Touch great, the fact that the designers of these APIs used well-known design patterns to guide them and reuse those design patterns over and over again for different types of components. If you learn these design patterns thoroughly, then you'll have no problem whatsoever working with any of the components available in Cocoa Touch.

Finding What Other Controls Are Available in Cocoa Touch

Cocoa Touch provides a rich library of user interface (UI) elements to use in your applications. The components available to you include switches, sliders, buttons, progress indicators, busy indicators, ...