iPhone® Application Development All-In-One For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Developing the Main View

In This Chapter

• Using your friendly Xcode Text editor

• Adding your code to the Main view controller

• Creating animation in the Main view

I wanted to keep this example iPhone utility app as simple as possible so that you can focus on how it works as an app in the iPhone OS — and you can then go off and design your complex app. The Utility Application template creates the skeleton for a fully functioning iPhone app (DeepThoughts) — and now you get to flesh it all out with some code that transforms it from an app that just sits there and looks pretty to an app that actually does something.

DeepThoughts is supposed to display "falling" words — text flowing down the Main view in different sizes, starting with the words "Peace Love Groovy Music" — at a specified time interval and at a speed the user can change. DeepThoughts should also allow the user to enter text in the Flipside view to substitute different words for "Peace Love Groovy Music" and, eventually, to select a photo from the iPhone's photo library to substitute for the words.

As you add the code to DeepThoughts, I also explain some of the features of the Xcode Text editor.

Using the Xcode Text Editor

The main tool you use to write code for an iPhone application is the Xcode Text editor. Apple has gone out of its way to make the Text editor as user-friendly as possible, as evidenced by the following list of (quite convenient) features:

• Code Sense: Code Sense is a feature of the editor that shows arguments, ...