January 2009
Intermediate to advanced
392 pages
10h 3m
English
Content preview from iPhone SDK Application DevelopmentBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. Interface Builder: Xcode’s GUI for GUIs
One of the most time-consuming steps in writing an application can be designing the UI. The iPhone has a UI that’s unmistakable from any other mobile device—a feature-rich, high-resolution form factor designed to accommodate navigation without a stylus (it’s fat finger-friendly). Old school hackers who have written UIs by hand will tell you that they require a lot of code and more time than a developer wants to spend on them. The good news is that Apple went to great lengths to make it simple for SDK developers to implement a standard set of UIs. The iPhone SDK includes a utility named Interface Builder, which gives the designer a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop environment for creating and editing windows, creating views, and placing controls on the screen with little effort. The user can store the screen layout as a template file, which your application can read and synthesize as an object in your application. This allows you to create a user interface in minutes and make future changes with little or no code changes. Desktop developers might remember this approach from resource forks of the past.
The Interface Builder application can be found in the /Developer applications folder on your desktop machine. If you followed our advice in Chapter 1, you’ve already dragged this folder onto your dock, and you can launch it by opening the dock stack and selecting the Interface Builder application. If you haven’t heeded our sage advice, you’ll need ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.