iPhone® Application Development For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Looking Behind the Screen

In This Chapter

• Seeing how applications actually work

• Understanding how to use the fundamental design patterns

• Doing Windows (even if you say you don't)

• Creating an app with a view

• Manipulating view controllers

• Listing the frameworks you can use

One of the things that makes iPhone software development so appealing is the richness of the tools and frameworks provided in the Apple's iPhone Software Development Kit for iPhone Applications (SDK). The frameworks are especially important; each one is a distinct body of code that actually implements your application's "generic" functionality — gives the application its basic way of working, in other words. This is especially true of one framework in particular — the UIKit framework, the heart of the user interface.

In this chapter, I'm going to lead you on a journey through most of the iPhone's user interface architecture — a mostly static view that explains what the various pieces are, what each does, and how they interact with each other. This will lay the groundwork for developing the ReturnMeTo application's user interface, which you get a chance to tackle in Chapter 5. After that's done — but before you start major coding — I'll take you on a similar tour of the iPhone application runtime environment — the dynamic view of all the pieces working together when, for example, the user launches your application or touches a button on the screen.

Using Frameworks

A framework is designed to easily integrate any ...