Sprucing Up the Main View
Now that you have some rudimentary code written, it’s time to pick up the pace. If you look underneath the alert in Figure 8-5, or if you dismiss the alert, you can see that you are close to the user interface I showed you in Chapter 4, but not quite there. While some of what you’ll need to do to get to this user interface could be accomplished in Interface Builder, some can’t, and I want to explain how to set the appearance of controls programmatically in your app.
Users appreciate consistency of the user interface on their iPad. If you just use the interface objects “as is,” however, your app looks sort of generic.
To allow developers to spice up the look of their apps, Apple provides three basic ways to customize a control’s appearance:
By setting properties in Interface Builder: You use this approach when you create the custom button in Chapter 5, in the section about adding user interface objects.
By setting properties in your program: These include some of the same properties that you could have set in Interface Builder, and some that can only be set programmatically.
By customizing the appearance of an entire class: An example is a UIButton, which ...
Get iPad Application Development For Dummies, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
