Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Today I want to cover a small problem with the UITableView method scrollToRowAtIndexPath:atScrollPosition:animated. This method doesn’t work quite properly when called from an out-of-the-box UITableViewController on a navigation controller’s stack. Some special setup is needed.

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While working on an iPhone app, I had occasion to create some ‘utility code’ – functions that were used by several view controllers, but that didn’t really belong to any one in particular. It wasn’t clear to me where this code should live; assigning it to any one VC was a non-starter, and, since I was using pure plist data structures (NSDictionaries, NSArrays, etc.) as my models, it didn’t seem natural to add the code to them, either.

In the end I decided to stick the code into the Application Delegate, but I felt guilty about it.

I’ve become a big fan of SQLite on the iPhone. One nice feature of SQLite is its transaction support; this lets you commit application state changes to disk in an “all-or-nothing” manner. To use transactions effectively, however, you may need to share your DB connections; I provide a simple class for that purpose.

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Today, a quick note on an iPhone gotcha that recently bit me. The short version is that a UIViewControler's navigationController property is cleared when that view controller is removed from its nav. controller, which can trip you up if you’re manipulating that nav. controller in complex ways.

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UIActionSheets and UIAlertViews are two slightly obscure but very handy classes that can give your iPhone app a more polished appearance with very little effort. They’re worth the few minutes it takes to read up on them.

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