Tab and Nav Bars

henning — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:52:57 +0000

I recently worked on how to arrange navigation and tab bars, and figured out some things. I’m trying to create an app where the first page is a table view controlled by a nav bar. A table view is just a list. It can be grouped (like in Settings) or not (like in Contacts). A nav bar is what you see in the Contacts app near the top. It has the + symbol in it. When you view a contact’s details, it shows a button that lets you get back to the contact list. In my app, once the user selects an item in the table view, I want to go to a more detailed view, and another view thereafter. Those will all be controlled by the nav bar.

On top of that there’s the tab bar. You can see tab bars in action at the bottom of the Phone and iPod apps. It lets you tab between views. I plan to use it to add additional functionality not controlled by the nav bar.

It wasn’t nearly as obvious as I thought it’d be. I thought I could do all this through the Interface Builder. That may be possible, but I didn’t find it. So I cut up all the pages and put them each in their own XIB. I then connected the views programmatically and got my table view working inside the nav bar, both inside the tab bar. Whew!

Now I gotta figure out the ordering of stuff in the nav bar. I somehow thought that the order I added things in would result in having my table view first. Instead the details view shows up first and I have to go back to the table view. Weirdness. Ah well, no rest for the weary!

I spent all this evening watching the season finale of Terminator Chronicles, which I missed when it originally aired. And registering for this domain. And creating this blog. And creating this blog entry. So this status update reflects work done yesterday.

Chewy Apps » blog

Tab and Nav Bars