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

Chapter 1. Show Me the Data

In This Chapter

• Creating and using property lists

• Discovering how dictionaries work

• Updating dictionaries and property lists

• Having a property list object array) write itself to a file

What you accomplished in Book V is all fine and dandy. You've essentially created a "wire frame" for the user experience and filled in a few of the pieces.

Although those fillings are valuable, the real meat of the RoadTrip application, besides the maps, is in the Sights and Hotels sections. But those, as opposed to car information and car servicing, are going to require some significant data. In this minibook, I show you how to deal with all that data using property lists, the URL Loading System, and Core Data.

In this chapter, you work on the Sights selection on the main screen. I show you how to create a Sights menu that uses a local image and then downloads the data about the sight from a Web server when the user selects that particular sight.

I put the data on the Web server because, if you were to offer this as a commercial app, you would want the data on the Internet so you can update it with the latest information — summer versus winter hours, for example, or letting users know that tours now start on the half hour rather than the quarter hour. You'd also want it on the Internet so you can easily add new things to play with, based on user feedback. (You can also easily add an e-mail or Twitter feature to this app, for example, although I don't have room in this book to ...