Just a few weeks ago Apple introduced the new iPhone devices, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. As we all saw, the screen sizes are bigger than all the older iPhone screens, meaning that any new applications must be build in that way so they work on all devices. Even more, if we consider the iPad screens, then the number of screen sizes that any application should adapt to becomes even greater. From a first point of view, that may seem a big hassle for developers, however that’s not true at all.
In iOS 8, Apple introduces the so-called adaptive user interface or adaptive layout. With that new philosophy, application interfaces can be adjusted and configured pretty fast for any kind of display. With adaptive UI, some existing concepts have become deprecated, such as various delegate methods regarding the device orientation. On the other hand, new concepts are provided for easier and more general handling of the interface, and developers just need to get used to working with them. Anyway, in this tutorial I’m not going to discuss in depth about the adaptive UI, but as we are going to be in align with it, there are a few things that we will see in a bit more detail later on.
Further than all the above, it’s well known that iOS 8 not only contains new features, but great improvements to existing ones as well. Of course, view controllers could not just stay out of those improvements, and that’s more or less what we are going to talk about. Specifically, we are going to focus on two special view controllers, the UISplitViewController and the UIPopoverViewController.