iOS 6 Foundations

chapter six

Working with Storyboard Inspectors

You have seen the interface of your Party Planner app (based on the Master-Detail Application template) from the perspective of the user as well as from your perspective as an interface designer using storyboards. There’s another perspective to look at, and it is the perspective of code. In Chapter 5, “Walking Through the iPhone Storyboard,” you saw how to add objects to your interface (a text field and a button served as examples).

In this chapter, you’ll see how to work with code that is already part of the Cocoa Touch frameworks as well as code that you write. With storyboards, this is another set of graphical user interface tools. They let you connect the objects of the interface to the code in the frameworks.

The structure of the storyboard and the code that’s behind it is basically simple, but it may take a little getting used to. Remember that if you’re still thinking about programming as writing line after line of code, you have to adjust to the nonlinear development process of Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. Part of that adjustment is understanding the code that’s already in the template. Once you grasp the basics of storyboard design, you’ll find that implementing new functionality is often a matter of just using a few checkboxes and Control-dragging in the Interface Builder editor. There may be a few lines of code to be written at the end of the process, but that’s the structure you’re working with: a graphical user interface ...