Educational Demonstrations

The educational demonstration screen shots shown here are part of an iPhone Developer Education course developed for our partner company www.nonatomic-retain.com.

Custom Table View Cells play a big part in the way iPhone applications present visually attractive content to iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

A common way to obtain easily customised Table View Cells is to load the custom cell from a NIB document. While not inherently complicated, the mechanics of doing this correctly are finicky, but the results are worth the (relatively) straightforward set of steps the developer needs to take.

Core Graphics is the two-D graphics engine that powers both Mac OS X desktop and iPhone. Core Graphics is the lineal descendant of Adobe Systems' PostScript printer description language, and is one of the most powerful graphics engines in the computer industry.
The demonstration involves two legacies of PostScript. One is the concept of Colour Gradients (or blends, or ramps, known as Smooth Shading in PostScript Language Level 3). The other is the notion of Pattern Colour Spaces, where a pattern cell defined by vector drawing operations is used to tile an area.

Copy and Paste capabilities were introduced in iPhone SDK 3.0 in March 2009.

The copy and paste machinery for iPhone is based largely on technologies similar to those used on Mac OS X desktop Appkit, and employ various types of Paste Boards, plus the use of Keyed Archiving to place and subsequently retrieve serialised objects onto and from the Paste Board.

Touches involve iPhone and iPod Touch owners interacting with their appliance via their fingers.

The demonstration shown here introduces student developers to the machinery of Responders, Touches, and Events. Our students write code to intercept Touches and to drag the image around the screen. This particular demonstration also introduces basic animations provided by the UIView class, to animate the motion of the image back to the centre of the screen.