How To Use UIScrollView to Scroll and Zoom Content

This is a blog post by iOS Tutorial Team member Matt Galloway, founder of SwipeStack, a mobile development team based in London, UK.

UIScrollViews are one of the most useful controls in iOS. They are a great way to present content larger than a single screen, and there’s a lot of tips and tricks about using them you should know!

In this tutorial you’ll learn all about UIScrollViews, from beginning to advanced. You’ll learn:

• How to use a scroll view to view a very large image.
• How to keep the scroll view’s content centered while zooming.
• How to embed a complex view hierarchy inside a UIScrollView.
• How to use UIScrollView’s paging feature in conjunction with the UIPageControl, to allow scrolling through multiple pages of content.
• How to make a “peeking” scroll view that gives a glimpse of the previous/next page as well as the current page.
• And much more!

This tutorial assumes some familiarity with Objective-C and iOS programming. If you are a complete beginner, you may wish to check out some of the other tutorials on this site first.

This tutorial also assumes that you know how to use Interface Builder to add new objects to a view and connect outlets, so make sure that you do. Further, this tutorial uses a storyboard. You’ll want to get familiar with them if you aren’t already, perhaps by reading the Storyboards tutorial on this site.

Lastly, I’ll be using Xcode 4 in this tutorial, so make sure you’re fully updated to the latest version available through the Mac App Store.

Getting Started

Fire up Xcode and create a new project with the iOS\Application\Single View Application template. EnterScrollViews for the product name, enter the company identifier you used when creating your App ID, leave the class prefix blank, set device family to iPhone, and make sure that Use Storyboards and Use Automatic Reference Counting are checked (but leave the other checkboxes unchecked):

Click Next and choose a location to save your project.

How To Create A Simple iPhone App in iOS 5 Tutorial: Part 3/3

This article is the final part of a 3 part series on how to create a simple iPhone app for beginners. And this app happens to be about rating scary bugs!

In the first part of the series, we created an app that contained a list of bugs in a table view.

In the second part of the series, we covered how to create a detail view for the bugs.

In this article, we’ll cover how to add new bugs, how to add an icon and default image to our project, and how to handle long-running operations.

So let’s wrap this app up!

Adding and Deleting Bugs

Everything’s working great so far, but so far this isn’t a very user-friendly app! I mean the first thing anyone would want to do is add their own bug, and so far the only way to do that is by editing code!

Luckily, since we wrote our DetailViewController to allow editing of bugs, and are using a UITableViewController for the RootViewController, most of the infrastructure is already in place! There are just four changes we have to make, but I’m going to explain them bit-by-bit to keep things easy to understand:

How To Create A Simple iPhone App on iOS 5 Tutorial: Part 2/3

This article is the second part of a three-part series on how to create a simple iPhone app for beginners. And this app happens to be about rating scary bugs!

In the first part of the series, we created an app that contained a list of bugs in a table view.

In this second article, we’ll cover how to create a detail view so that we can view a larger picture of the bugs, rate them, and and change their pictures!

In the third and final part of the series, we’ll cover how to add new bugs, add an icon and default image to our project, and handle long-running operations.

How To Create A Simple iPhone App on iOS 5 Tutorial: Part 1/3

The iPhone is an amazing platform to develop on for indie software developers. It’s never been easier to come up with your own unique app idea, code something up, and have it be available to millions of potential customers!

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions from people new to iOS development asking how to get started. So I thought it would be helpful to write a tutorial series tailored for beginners.

But rather than focusing in detail on just one topic, we’re going to dive in and create an entire functional app from scratch. By the end, you’ll have tried out many areas of iPhone development, and ready to dig in further.

So what’s the app we’re going to make? Well, there’s a story behind that…

The other night, I saw a picture of a Potato Bug for the first time and started freaking out because it was so big and ugly! Then I got obsessed with looking up all kinds of scary bug pictures online. So to spread the fun, we’re going to make an app for that – rating scary bugs!

While making this app, we’ll cover some of the most commonly used topics in iPhone development: