The Rosetta Stone of iPhone UI Development

I’ve been working on Deadline iPhone, and I got stuck trying to figure out how to create grouped form–like UI elements. Apple’s applications use them a lot, so I thought I’d be able to create them in Interface Builder.

Here’s what I wanted:

I figured out I needed to use a UITableView with UITableViewStyleGrouped, with a view controller set to be the delegate and dataSource for the table view. I seemed to do a lot of table view programming in Helipad iPhone, so I was familiar with the concepts but still struggled.

After searching Apple’s documentation I found the UICatalog example. This is the Rosetta Stone of iPhone development: it contains working code that explains how most of their apps interfaces work.

I seriously can’t believe I’ve been doing iPhone development this long without this example. It’s taken a lot of the drudgery out of non–IB interface work.