The UITableView is a terrific and versatile iOS component from Apple, but the amount of information and interactivity within one cell of a tableview is extremely limited. This isn’t an issue on the iPhone as with the small screen size there really isn’t much you can put in one cell anyways. With the iPad however there is definitely room for more.
There are different ways to solve this problem, and recently I mentioned a library that takes the approach of providing stacking and sliding tableview cells. Recently I came across another open source library taking a somewhat different approach to provide more interactivity in a UITableVIew cell.
This library for the iPad allows you to place multiple dynamic components within a tableview cell, and provides controls emulating the look of more typical desktop components such as pulldown menu’s, and combo boxes so that you can have a more congruent feel with any desktop versions of your application.
Here’s a video showing the example included with the library in action:
You can find the Github for the project by Eric Crichlow here:
https://github.com/ecrichlow/iPad-Dynamic-Table-Cells
You can find more information on Eric’s website about the library here:
Building Better iPad Tables
The library extends UITableViewCell so it can be dropped in, and the example is a great help for figuring everything out. This library looks great, and does even more than I’ve talked about here – like properly scaling things so that everything looks good. If you’ve wanted to accomplish similar to what’s in the video you should definitely check it out.
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