Introducing the UINavigationController

The Apple iOS documentation describes a UINavigationController as a “container for several other views,” which is as good a way of describing it as I can think of. Shown in Figure 5–4, it gives you a top navigation bar and an optional toolbar at the bottom.

There’s also space for bar button items on the navigation bar. Between the top and bottom bar there’s a space for your custom content to be loaded into: it’s into this space that you’ll push and pop view controllers.

Figure 5–4. The components of UINavigationController

Interacting with the content inside the view controllers–tapping on a row, tapping on a button, and so on–is the cue to call the UINavigationController’s pushViewController:animated: and popViewController:animated: methods.