Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

Receiving Touches

A UIResponder, and therefore a UIView, has four methods corresponding to the four UITouch phases that require UIEvent delivery. A UIEvent is delivered to a view by calling one or more of these four methods (the touches... methods):

touchesBegan:withEvent:

A finger touched the screen, creating a UITouch.

touchesMoved:withEvent:

A finger previously reported to this view with touchesBegan:withEvent: has moved.

touchesEnded:withEvent:

A finger previously reported to this view with touchesBegan:withEvent: has left the screen.

touchesCancelled:withEvent:

We are bailing out on a finger previously reported to this view with touchesBegan:withEvent:.

The parameters of these methods are:

The relevant touches

These are the event’s touches whose phase corresponds to the name of the method and (normally) whose view is this view. They arrive as an NSSet (Chapter 10). If you know for a fact that there is only one touch in the set, or that any touch in the set will do, you can retrieve it with anyObject (an NSSet doesn’t implement lastObject because a set is unordered).

The event

This is the UIEvent instance. It contains its touches as an NSSet, which you can retrieve with the allTouches message. This means all the event’s touches, including but not necessarily limited to those in the first parameter; there might be touches in a different phase or intended for some other view. You can call touchesForView: or touchesForWindow: to ask for the set of touches associated with ...