Using Switches, Segmented Controls, and Web Views

As you’ve probably noticed by now, we prefer to work on examples that do something. It’s one thing to show a few lines of code in a chapter and say “this will do <blah>,” but it’s another to take a collection of features and combine them in a way that results in a working application. In some cases, the former approach is unavoidable, but this isn’t one of them. Our first hands-on example makes use of web views, a segmented control, and a toggle switch.

Implementation Overview

In this project, we create an application that displays flower photographs and flower information from the website FloraPhotographs.com. The application enables a user to touch a flower color within a segmented control (UISegmentedControl), resulting in a flower of that color being fetched and displayed from the FloraPhotographs site in a web view (UIWebView). The user can then use a toggle switch (UISwitch) to show and hide a second web view that contains details about the flower being displayed. Finally, a standard button (UIButton) enables the user to fetch another flower photo of the currently selected color from the site. The result should look very much like Figure 9.3.