Chapter 5
Delivering Dynamic Content with Tables

Every piece of user interface we’ve seen so far in WatchKit has something in common: it’s static. We create the watch app’s UI in Interface Builder, set it up just so, and then use it in the app, but we can’t add or remove interface objects. Sure, we can get clever and hide some portions of the UI, but there’s one thing we haven’t yet seen: creating dynamic user interfaces that respond to users’ data. In our iPhone app, we can create these interfaces manually, perhaps placed inside a UIScrollView if there’s more than a screenful of content, but it’s much more common—and easier—to use either UITableView or UICollectionView. WatchKit targets much smaller screen sizes than UIKit, so it offers us WKInterfaceTable, a simpler, stripped-down version of UIKit’s table views.

In this chapter, let’s explore tables in WatchKit. We’ll cover how they work, how they differ from UIKit, and how to use them the right way. By the end of this chapter, you’ll know how to present your data in rows, how to make it perform well, and how to make it look fantastic.