Xcode's Interface Builder is a pretty good user-interface layout tool, especially for simple situations. However, it is not the best tool for every job. Sometimes you have to write code to dynamically create user interface elements or to move them around as the view is resized.
When you do this …
Newcomers to iPhone development are sometimes surprised at how ugly the standard button controls are. They quickly learn that they need a graphic artist to create a nice-looking button image in Photoshop and then attach that to the buttons. However, in this tutorial, I'll show how to create nice shiny …
As an exercise in using the Core Animation API, I've implemented a little iPhone app that reproduces the behavior of the iPhone home screen's icon reorganization interface. (You know, dragging the wiggly icons around.) You can download my sample code to see how it works. Some descriptions of the highlights …
When you create a table-view-based iPhone app, by default you get tables with plain white rows. But all the cool kids are making apps with 3D-ish gradient backgrounds. You want to make those kinds of apps too, right? This article explains how.
Making table cells with custom backgrounds is …
While working on an iPhone application, I decided I wanted to change the colors of the background and section headers of a UITableView with the UITableViewStyleGrouped style. It took a lot more work than I expected, so I'm sharing what I learned with anyone else who needs to do this …
For an iPhone app that I'm working on, I want to be able to save the screen image to the Photos album. My first attempt at this was complicated: I created a color space, a bitmap context, a CGImage, and finally a UIImage, copying and pasting most of the code …