Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

Chapter 33. Mail and Messages

Your app can present an interface allowing the user to edit and send a mail message or an SMS message. Two view controller classes are provided by the Message UI framework; your app will link to MessageUI.framework and import <MessageUI/MessageUI.h>. The classes are:

MFMailComposeViewController

Allows composition and sending of a mail message.

MFMessageComposeViewController

Allows composition and sending of an SMS message.

New in iOS 6, the Social framework lets you post a message to Twitter or Facebook (or Weibo) on the user’s behalf. Link to Social.framework and import <Social/Social.h>. You can use an SLComposeViewController to give the user an interface to construct and send a message, or prepare and post a message directly using SLRequest.

Also new iOS 6, UIActivityViewController (Chapter 26) provides a unified interface for letting the user choose any of the built-in messaging milieus (mail, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo). To give the user a chance to send a message through one of these milieus, with an initial message body or other data that you supply, you should use UIActivityViewController. However, I have not found any way to make UIActivityViewController fill in the fields of a proposed mail message. For example, for my users to be able to email me from within one of my apps, I must fill in the To field in the mail composition form. MFMailComposeViewController lets me do that; UIActivityViewController doesn’t. Thus, the Message UI ...