Chapter 8
Creating a Simple Table Based App

That's been one of my mantras - Focus and Simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

- Steve Jobs

Now that you have a basic understanding of prototyping and our demo app, we'll work on something more interesting and build a simple table-based app using UITableView in this chapter. Once you master the technique and the table view customization (to be discussed in the next chapter), we'll start to build the Food Pin app.

First of all, what exactly is a table view in an iPhone app? A table view is one of the most common UI elements in iOS apps. Most apps (except games), in some ways, make use of table view to display content. The best example is the built-in Phone app. Your contacts are displayed in a table view. Another example is the Mail app. It uses a table view to display your mail boxes and emails. Not only designed for listing textual data, table view allows you to present the data in the form of images. The TED, Google+ and Airbnb are also good examples. Figure 8-1 displays a few more sample table-based apps. Though they look different, all in some ways utilize a table view.

What we are going to do in this chapter is create a very simple table view and learn how to populate data (images and text) into it.

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