Comments on: Handling Your Initial View Controllers for iPhone

By: Luc Juggery

Luc Juggery — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:35:00 +0000

Hello again,

I think I figured it out, I had a bad UIWindow / MainViewController as I though. But do not hesitate to tell if you see something strange in the gist

Cheers,
Luc

By: Luc Juggery

Luc Juggery — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:09:41 +0000

Thanks Mike, that clarifies things.

In my current iOS app project, I am doing the switch of views (login / tabbar) in the app’s delegate, I know that is not clean and that really bugs me
Reading your article I started changing this to use a MainViewController object because your approach is really clean (thanks).

I have a problem though as I do not see my views anymore (black screen) when is app is ran, there is a link I probably missed somewhere

I do not have any MainWindow.xib file so I’ve done the linking programmatically (pretty user this is this part causing problem). I’ve written the main stuff in this gist: https://gist.github.com/1744267

Would you have any idea of what is missing ?
Thanks a lot for your help.

Luc

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:36:26 +0000

A sign up view is just another view on the stack of other views. For usability reasons, I would include it as a subview or subcontroller of the login view. This is because it’s likely a new user would not be logged in, thus shown the login view. The login view would then have a link to a signup view. The login view would thus be responsible for login and signup. I would probably break this out into a UserAccountController that will handle communication with the server to handle login/authentication, signup and any other account tasks you need to handle. Under the UserAccountController you could have your ViewControllers to handle display and control of the appropriate views (Login, Signup, Edit Account).

I hope that made sense. Thanks for the comment!

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:32:16 +0000

The Window object itself is the one and only Window in your application. The Window needs a root view to begin displaying content and maintains a pointer to its root view. The tab bar controller’s view needs to be that root view to work properly, in some cases. However, your Root View Controller class can set the Window’s view to any other view it has access to. So, you use your root view controller to handle what view becomes the Window’s view and swap it out according to your needs.

Great question! I hope that cleared it up for you.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:26:13 +0000

Storyboards affect it a lot. In the method I used, I usually add my Views and ViewControllers programmatically. I actually don’t do a whole lot in Interface Builder unless it’s an actual and complex interface. If you want to use the new Storyboards method, you can setup your storyboard to handle the different view controllers, depending on the organization of your storyboards. However, that’s up to you and you can always choose to do anything programmatically to get things up and running and then switch over or vice versa.

By: Luc Juggery

Luc Juggery — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:59:52 +0000

Hello Mike,
just another question.. if you were to add a signup view, how would you add them in the picture ?
Thanks again,
Luc

By: Luc

Luc — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:58:23 +0000

thanks for this great tutorial. I managed to have the loginView / tabBArcontroller switch in my apps but I was sure I did not do it in a right way. Stacking the views makes things a lot clearer.

One thing I’m still not confortable with is the rootViewController object, I do not really understand when you said (talking about the tabBarcontroller) “It needs to be the root view of your window, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be the root view controller.”. Would do you mean ?

thanks, that’s great stuff,
Luc

By: LM

LM — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:39:43 +0000

how do storyboards affect this

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:00:57 +0000

Thanks for the comment. The likely reason you’re seeing the tab bar is because the app hasn’t fully quit. With the new iOS 4, multi-tasking is standard and the app might appear to be quitting, but you need to explicitly quit in order to see the login again.

By: Boju

Boju — Sat, 21 May 2011 17:40:23 +0000

Hello Mike

Thanks for the wonderful tutorial. After lots of search. I ended up in yours and it makes sense your way of programming. I have been off IT for sometime and just getting back with iPhone. Got get rid of my passion. Two things. I downloaded your sample code and figured it out, how it works. I see it little bit different from your description above. However I figured out how i works.

One part, I am not able to figure out is. After login, I am able to show my tabbar. But On relaunch, It is going back to tab bar, but I want to show the login screen again. What do I do? Any help will do.

Thanks and Good Day!
Boju

By: iOS Development Code Kitchen

iOS Development Code Kitchen — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:03:50 +0000

[...] Handling Your Initial View Controllers [...]

By: SouthernBelle

SouthernBelle — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 02:42:31 +0000

Very nice, and helpful – this was exactly the information I have been searching for! Thanks SO much!

By: admin

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:46:35 +0000

If you have a reference to the view, you can call it’s removeFromSuperView method. You can put that inside another method that gets called automatically, either by a timer or by some other action. What are you stuck on specifically?

By: ktkintaiwan

ktkintaiwan — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:38:47 +0000

You’re awesome!
thx~

By: ktk

ktk — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 06:37:44 +0000

You’re awesome!
thx~