iOS Developer Article Roundup: An Editable UITableViewController, a Cancellable Asynchronous NSURLConnection, “Auto Layout in iOS 7” Tutorials, and NSError

Editable UITableViewController

Here’s a UI pattern that appears all the time:

In this pattern, you see a list of items in a table view — a master view. If you tap on an item’s cell or some control inside that cell, you get taken to a detail view where you can edit that item’s details. It’s tried and true, but there are times when it would useful — and faster — to be able to edit these items right inside the table view, like the way it’s done in the table view below:

The article Editable UITableViewController in iOS-Blog shows you how to build such a table view and even provides the source files for a project in exchange for a tweet.

An Asynchronous NSURLConnection That Can be Cancelled

You can’t cancel an NSURLConnection out of the box, but Damien Deville came up with a way to make a cancellable one by harnessing NSOperation, which lets you package code and data into a single task, and sports a cancel method. Clever idea.

“Beginning Auto Layout in iOS 7” Tutorials

Over at RayWenderlich.com, there’s a two-part tutorial on using Auto Layout, for which author Matthijs Hollemans says:

Thankfully, Xcode 5 makes Auto Layout a lot easier. If you tried Auto Layout in Xcode 4 and gave up, then we invite you to give it another try with Xcode 5.

Part 1 covers the basics of Auto Layout using Interface Builder, and part 2 focuses on constraints.

 “To Err is Human, to NSError is Cocoa.”

“NSError is the unsung hero of the Foundation framework,” writes NSHipster’s Mattt Thompson in his latest article. “Passed gallantly in and out of perilous method calls, it is the messenger by which we are able to contextualize our failures.” In the article, he writes about NSError and where you’ll run into it: as a consumer and as a producer.