Beautiful Table View Helper Class

Beautiful Table View Demo Screenshot

A while back, Matt Gallagher from Cocoa with Love wrote an excellent post on customizing UITableView drawing.

In the article, Matt shows how you can style UITableViews quite easily by setting the backgroundView and selectedBackgroundView to UIImageViews containing custom background images for each cell. The only trick to it is to make sure that you choose the proper image based on whether you’re the top row, bottom row, middle row, or only row in the table.

Anyway, I’ve found the techniques he mentions in the article pretty useful in a number of projects, so I wrote Beautiful Table View helper class so I could get the functionality easily whenever I want to include a table view controller. I thought I’d post the code here in case anyone else might find it useful: here’s a sample project.

To “beautify” your table view controller, all you have to do is derive your view controller from BeautifulTableViewController like so:

@interface FavoriteGamesTable : BeautifulTableViewController {
            // Your implementation
            }

Then implement numberOfSectionsInTableView, numberOfRowsInSection, and cellForRowAtIndexPath like you normally would. The only other thing you have to do is insert the following line before you return from cellForRowAtIndexPath:

[super beautifyCell:cell atIndexPath:indexPath];

And make sure to call [super viewDidLoad] in your viewDidLoad method. And that’s it! So feel free to use the Beautiful Table View Helper (and even the art, drawn by my talented wife!) in your projects if you find it useful. And thanks again to Matt for letting me know about this method!