iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Understanding Block Objects

Blocks are like traditional C functions in that blocks are small, self-contained units of code. They can be passed in as arguments of methods and functions and then used when they’re needed to do some work. (Like many programming topics, understanding block objects is easier when you use them, as you do in the previous section.)

With iOS 4 and newer versions, a number of methods and functions of the system frameworks are starting to take blocks as parameters, including the following:

Completion handlers

Notification handlers

Error handlers

Enumeration

View animation and transitions

Sorting

In the code listings in this chapter, you get to use a block-based method to animate the car, but block objects also have a number of other uses, especially in Grand Central Dispatch and the NSOperationQueue class, the two recommended technologies for concurrent processing. ...