It appears that the UICollectionView is getting some well deserved love. UICollectionView is a successor – or just a well designed sidekick – to the UITableView, and provides a great way to display a list of items and let the user scroll thru them and select them.
- For those like me using MonoTouch, Xamarin have a tutorial on collection views and a video seminar from Mike Bluestein.
- Mark Pospesel has an excellent slide deck and sample showing grids, cover flow, and how to make your own layout. It’s also been ported to RubyMotion, which might make it a lot easier to read for anyone using MonoTouch, as it’s only using code, not XIBs and storyboards.
- Bryan Hansen has a great tutorial on doing custom layouts, which I found very useful in my current project.
- Finally Nelson has a good sample for doing Pinterest-style waterfall layouts.
Most of these are in Objective-C, but if you are doing iOS development and can’t at least read Objective-C, I suggest you stop what you are doing, and learn enough to read it. It makes life a lot easier.
If you can target iOS6+ for your app, the UICollectionView is a lovely component to use – and while you could do a UITableView-style element with UICollectionView, I’d love to see UITableView2, which had the function or UITableView, but with interface clean up of UICollectionView.
Almost worth going iOS6 only for.
BONUS: The iOS Design Cheat Sheet. Just how high was that title bar…..