MapKit & Tables with Storyboarding

Abstract

There are five things I want you to bear in mind regarding this chapter:

• Continuation of Chapter 9: Chapter 10 takes what you learned in Chapter 9 and injects it with steroids. You will need to go over what you learned in Chapter 9 and go right into Chapter 10. In the lecture hall, I make my students in class run Chapter 9 in twenty minutes, that’s if they want a grade and then, immediately after emailing me a screenshot of their completed project, we go right into Chapter 10. May I suggest that, if you have taken a couple of days off after ending Chapter 9, that you too make yourself repeat Chapter 9 a couple of times until you can do it under twenty minutes. Even if you have to do it 15 times, do it over and over again before trying this chapter.

• Non-trivial: When you’re done with Chapter 10, you will have really accomplished something you can be proud of. Yes, on one hand students shriek with laughter when we debate what level of geekdom a student will be at a certain point, but the truth is that after you’ve completed this app, you will be able to get work as an Objective-C programmer, or at least be able to hold a decent conversation with an interviewer who will not believe you classified yourself as an absolute beginner. Neither did Apple when they hired a student of mine to work in their iOS 5 development in Cupertino. Eight months earlier, she’d never owned a Mac and was studying the first edition of this book, so take this seriously; this chapter will be a defining chapter in your life.

• Big Picture: As true as you are reading these words, there WILL be a time when this code will bog you down and, if you were in my lecture hall and I saw you overwhelmed and freaking out, I would walk up to you and remind you of the Big Picture. Throughout this chapter, I will bring you back to the Big Picture, which, in a nutshell, is a storyboard containing a table that is populated with many city names. We go to Google’s server and fetch the geospatial addresses of each of these cities and, when the user taps on one of the cities listed in your table, we travel along another segue that instantiates a MapKit that drops a pin in the center of that city.

• Chapter Outline: Chapter 10 has very little preliminaries because I want you to seamlessly keep your momentum from Chapter 9 right into 10. I will explain where the help files and videos are, how to use them if you choose to, and how these are different from previous help files.

• DO NOT GIVE UP: Chapter 10 tests you and I want you to break through. Listen to me when I say that nobody is going to do Chapter 10 in one try! You will have to start from scratch repeatedly. This issue of starting over is, in fact, the key: After spending a little time debugging, just start again from scratch. Please do not say to yourself: “Oh I can’t get this, look I’ve tried this 5 times and I can’t get through it!” It’s OK to fail and start again and I really want you to get through this. I want to see you go to the forum and tell everybody you got through Chapter 10! OK? Yeah!