Chapter 9
Presenting Data with Tables

So many of the iOS apps we use every day are built around the concept of “lists of things.” Twitter apps show lists of tweets, sports apps show lists of games and their scores, and streaming media apps show lists of episodes that are available for playback. Most of the time, the contents of these lists have been downloaded from the Net.

And if that sounds suspiciously like where we are with our podcast app, well, it should. What we are doing is the bread and butter of much of iOS development: get a list of available “things” from the Net, show them in a list to the user, and let the user pick one. In the last chapter, we handled the downloading part, and in the next chapter we’ll do the picking. Right now, we want to show the list. And to do that, we’re going to use one of the most common UI elements in iOS: the table view.