Chapter 8

Improving the Look of Cells

Using UITableView's built-in standard cell types is a great way to get up and running quickly. But pretty soon you're going to run up against the limitations of the standard look and feel and want to move beyond the typical layouts.

Creating and using custom cells isn't difficult, and builds on all the topics that we've covered so far. There are three main ways of customizing cells:

• Adding subviews to the cell's contentView
• Creating a custom cell in a NIB by using Interface Builder
• Creating a custom subclass of UITableViewCell

The three methods complement each other. In this chapter, you'll look at the first two. Then in Chapter 9, you'll take a detailed look at custom subclasses.

The two approaches in this chapter are different ways to achieve much the same result, but there's a certain amount of commonality between them. This chapter's examples include some repetition in order so it's possible to compare the two techniques.