iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual

Pull Yourself Together

Now that you've seen the views and models in the application, it's time to examine how controllers make everything work together. They're the glue that pulls your flashlight together.

You've already had a preview of the controllers: There's one controller for each of the NIB files that contains a view (User Interface: The Easy Way, for example). Of course, the basic controller created by Xcode doesn't have any instance variables or actions, nor does it have any of the logic specific to the application.

So hop back in the bus and let the tour continue.…

MainViewController

The design of the main flashlight view is simple by design. This leads to a controller that uses both models, but only has three view outlets. Two of the views are custom UIView subclasses. As with most controllers, the interesting part is how it interacts with the views and models.

Digging Deeper: Crack Open a Simulator

The Simulator is a powerful debugging tool. But it has a problem: Every time you build and run a new version of your app, it's copied into a new folder. This folder uses a long string of hexadecimal numbers (in the GUID format) and is hard to locate.

And you want to locate it while debugging, because that's where your application's documents and settings are stored. When working on models, it's often helpful to locate the backing store for the data. Whether the file contains a SQLite database, a property list, or even a plain-text file, it's important that you can verify what's ...