Tab Bars and Pickers

Abstract

In the previous chapter, you built your first multiview application. In this chapter, you’re going to build another one—this time, it will be a full tab bar application with five different tabs and five different content views. Building this application will reinforce a lot of what you learned in Chapter 6. Now, you’re too smart to spend a whole chapter doing stuff you already sort of know how to do, so we’re going to use those five content views to demonstrate a type of iOS control that we have not yet covered. The control is called a picker view, or just a picker. You may not be familiar with the name, but you’ve almost certainly used a picker if you’ve owned an iPhone or iPod touch for more than, say, 10 minutes. Pickers are the controls with dials that spin. You use them to input dates in the Calendar application or to set a timer in the Clock application (see Figure 7-1). On the iPad, the picker view isn’t quite as common since the larger display lets you present other ways of choosing among multiple items; but even there, it’s used in the Calendar application.