Tables on iOS

Coming from the desktop, one might expect a UITableView to look something like a spreadsheet, with rows and columns presented in a two-dimensional grid. Instead, the table view is a vertically scrolling list of items, optionally split into sections.

The table view is essential for many of the apps that ship with the iPhone, as well as popular third-party apps. In Mail, tables are used for the list of accounts, the mailboxes within each account, and the contents of each mailbox. The Reminders app is little more than a table view with some editing features, as are the alarms in the Clock app. The Music app shows lists of artists or albums, and within them lists of songs. Even the Settings app is built around a table, albeit one of a different style than is used in most apps (more on that later).

And while our Twitter app currently displays a web view of all the tweets we’ve parsed, pretty much every Twitter app out there (including the official Twitter app, as well as Twitterrific, Tweetbot, and Echofon) uses a table view to present tweets.

So our task now is to switch from the web view to a table view–based presentation of the tweets. We’ll build this up slowly, as our understanding of tables and what they can do for us develops.