Views Manage Your Application’s Visual Content

A view is an instance of the UIView class (or one of its subclasses) and manages a rectangular area in your application window. Views are responsible for drawing content, handling multitouch events, and managing the layout of any subviews. Drawing involves using graphics technologies such as Core Graphics, OpenGL ES, or UIKit to draw shapes, images, and text inside a view’s rectangular area. A view responds to touch events in its rectangular area either by using gesture recognizers or by handling touch events directly. In the view hierarchy, parent views are responsible for positioning and sizing their child views and can do so dynamically. This ability to modify child views dynamically lets your views adjust to changing conditions, such as interface rotations and animations.

You can think of views as building blocks that you use to construct your user interface. Rather than use one view to present all of your content, you often use several views to build a view hierarchy. Each view in the hierarchy presents a particular portion of your user interface and is generally optimized for a specific type of content. For example, UIKit has views specifically for presenting images, text and other types of content.

Windows Coordinate the Display of Your Views

A window is an instance of the UIWindow class and handles the overall presentation of your application’s user interface. Windows work with views (and their owning view controllers) to manage interactions with, and changes to, the visible view hierarchy. For the most part, your application’s window never changes. After the window is created, it stays the same and only the views displayed by it change. Every application has at least one window that displays the application’s user interface on a device’s main screen. If an external display is connected to the device, applications can create a second window to present content on that screen as well.

Animations Provide the User with Visible Feedback for Interface Changes

Animations provide users with visible feedback about changes to your view hierarchy. The system defines standard animations for presenting modal views and transitioning between different groups of views. However, many attributes of a view can also be animated directly. For example, through animation you can change the transparency of a view, its position on the screen, its size, its background color, or other attributes. And if you work directly with the view’s underlying Core Animation layer object, you can perform many other animations as well.

The Role of Interface Builder

Interface Builder is an application that you use to graphically construct and configure your application’s windows and views. Using Interface Builder, you assemble your views and place them in a nib file, which is a resource file that stores a freeze-dried version of your views and other objects. When you load a nib file at runtime, the objects inside it are reconstituted into actual objects that your code can then manipulate programmatically.

Interface Builder greatly simplifies the work you have to do in creating your application’s user interface. Because support for Interface Builder and nib files is incorporated throughout iOS, little effort is required to incorporate nib files into your application’s design.

For more information about how to use Interface Builder, see Interface Builder User Guide. For information about how view controllers manage the nib files containing their views, see Creating Custom Content View Controllers in View Controller Programming Guide for iOS.