iOS 5 Programming Cookbook

4.0. Introduction

iOS programmers are all used to view controllers by now. We know how to use navigation controllers in order to push and pop view controllers. But Apple believes this can be done more easily, and that’s the whole story behind storyboards. Storyboarding is the new way of defining the connection between different screens in your app. For instance, if you have 20 unique view controllers in your app that you coded a year ago and are looking at the source code again now, you will need to find your way around the connections between these view controllers, and to try to remember what view controller is pushed when a certain action is taken by the user. This can be very difficult, especially if you have not documented your code. Storyboards come to the rescue. With storyboards, you can now view/create your entire app’s UI and the connections between view controllers in one screen. It’s that simple.

To take advantage of storyboarding, you need to get acquainted with Interface Builder. Don’t worry; it’s all covered in this chapter.

With storyboards, one screen’s worth of content is called a scene. The relation between a scene and a storyboard on the iPhone can be compared to a view and a view controller. In a scene, you put all your content on the screen to be presented to the user at the same time. On the iPad, more than one scene can be presented to the user at the same time because of the bigger screen.

Storyboarding supports transitioning from one scene to another. The ...