Have you ever used an app and found it better to use than another one of its kind? But what makes one app better than another? Well, creating an intuitive and simple design that's easy to navigate is essential and delivering a satisfactory user experience. To achieve this experience in iOS, you have access to a wide range of components called views. In this video, you'll learn more about the different views available to you and how you can create a user interface or UI with them in Xcode. What are views? Views are the fundamental building blocks of your apps user interface or UI. In other words, the UI in an iOS app is comprised of a collection of views. Text, images and buttons are all views in iOS. You can create views using Swift code or an Xcode storyboard. The behaviors that are common to all views are defined by the UIView class, which is iOS built-in view class. The UIView class is designed to hold one or more UI elements that will appear to the user and manages the content for a rectangular area on the screen. It is ultimately responsible for displaying information or content and event handling. Generally, iOS apps will contain one or more ViewControllers, where each ViewController is one screen of the app. The controllers will contain one or more UI components and those UI components are instances of view. ViewControllers are fundamental for your iOS app as they govern what happens onscreen, from UI and animation to interaction, to navigation and the many steps in-between. There are various views available in Xcode for implementing UI in your app. They have distinctive designs that you can select based on the requirements of your app. Let's explore a few of the commonly used iOS UI views. ScrollView helps you to display content that is larger than the size of the screen. It can contain all the other UI elements, such as image views, labels and text views. You can use TableView if you need to vertically display one or more reusable elements in a scrollable manner. This consists of many cells and has special features such as headers, footers, rows, and sections. SplitView will help you manage to views side-by-side, a master on the left and a detailed view towards right. This is useful when you want your app to be responsive on an iPad. Now, let's examine how these UI views are used within an Xcode storyboard called main.storyboard. I'm going to demonstrate how to create a main.storyboard file. You will use this to create your user interface or UI components. The project folder for the project I generated previously, video_player is on the top-left. To create a new file, you can right-click and select "New File." A window appears where you can choose from a variety of file formats. The focus of this video is UI. Let's select the storyboard format from the user interface options. You can then click on Next. Another window will pop up. In this Save As section, you can change the name from storyboard to main. You can leave the other default settings for now and click on "Create." The storyboard is now displayed, this is where you are going to add new components. To illustrate, let's create a ScrollView which you learned about earlier. This will enable access to the library of UI components such as text, button, ScrollView and other UI components that you need to create an app. You have the option to select these components from this environment or to use a shortcut on your keyboard. To use the environment, you will need to click the plus button, which represents library located on the top right of this environment. If you click the plus button, a window that offers a variety of UI components for development opens. You can choose from a wide range of components, including a Switch, Activity Indicator View, Page Control, TextView, ScrollView, Date Picker and more. That's how to access your UI components using the environment. The other alternative is to use your keyboard. If you select Command Shift L on your keyboard, this will also open the library. Now let's select ScrollView by double-clicking on it. This generates the ScrollView UI component, which you can drag and place where you'd like it to be displayed on the main storyboard we created earlier. You can adjust the height and width depending on what you want to do with the ScrollView. You now know how to create a UI component in your main.storyboard file. Soon, you'll be able to use a main storyboard to create your first video player up. In this video, you'll learn more about views and common types, as well as how they are used within Xcode. Views are an integral part of building the UI for your iOS mobile apps.
