• 2 Bored For FUN: Operating System Interface Design From 1981 to 2009
  Over the years a range of GUI's have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windowsamiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more. We'll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80's.

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Is your UITableView too large for your UINavigationController? Is the content appearing behind your UITabBar? Then read on... :)

This one kicked my butt for a few hours today. I have my app structured using numerous XIB files and I have two possible root screens, one of which is the main one that loads in a UITabBarController which, in its first tab has a UIViewController with its own UIView which, in turn, has a UINavigationController whose view is a UITableView. The UINavigationController's view is added to the UIViewController's view as a subview. If you Google around, you'll find that when you start nesting these babies, you apparently start running into issues. Mine was that the UITableView was not displaying at the right height regardless of which component's settings I tweaked up the view hierarchy.

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To switch to the All-In-One layout, open Xcode's preferences window by choosing Xcode > Preferences. Click the General button in the preferences window toolbar. Choose All-In-One from the Layout pop-up menu.

From Reducing Xcode's Window Clutter by Me and Mark Publishing.

Here are two wonderfully useful articles by the folks at Probably Interactive on Images and UITableViewCells and Objective-C key paths.

The first article describes a method of loading images into table view cells while keeping the UI responsive using threads (you can also do the same thing using NSOperation/NSOperationInvocation and NSOperationQueue but it was instructive for me to see the threaded approach). The article also has a fully-working example that you can download and play with. (And while you're at it, also check out the atebits article on how to render your table view cells for maximum performance.)

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Changing the name of your project in XCode is not straightforward. Thankfully, Monte Ohrt has a neat little blog post detailing the process in a few easy steps. Note: Requires TextMate (or other editor with global search and replace).