Customizing Table View Cells

You can do a lot with table views right out of the box, but often, you will want to format the data for each row in ways that simply aren't supported by UITableViewCell directly. In those cases, there are two basic approaches: one that involves adding subviews to UITableViewCell programmatically when creating the cell, and a second that involves loading a set of subviews from a nib file. Let's look at both techniques.

Adding Subviews to the Table View Cell

To show how to use custom cells, we're going to create a new application with another table view. In each row, we'll display two lines of information along with two labels (see Figure 8–15). Our application will display the name and color of a series of potentially familiar computer models, and we'll show both of those pieces of information in the same table cell by adding subviews to the table view cell.