Tab bar based apps are probably as common as table-based apps and it’s even more common to see them combined. That’s what we’re going to do in this tutorial.

There is a very easy way of creating a tab bar application. In fact, it’s so easy it requires no work whatsoever. When you choose to create a new iPhone application in Xcode, one of the options is Tab Bar Application. Just the bare-bones template provided by Apple gives you a fully-functioning app with two tabs. That is not what this tutorial will be about. We are going to create a tab bar controller programatically. It’s really a lot easier than most people think.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is a continuation of my previous tutorials so if you haven’t followed them, it’s a good time to catch up.

We’re going to be starting off from a slightly modified version of the previous source code. You can download the primer code for this tutorial here: MyDVDLibrary04Primer. The only changes made were some name changes (DetailViewController became DvdInfoViewController) and I organized all classes into groups.

Also, I’ve recently upgraded to OS X Snow Leopard + Xcode 3.2 with iPhone SDK 3.0 (not 3.1 yet) so the project was compiled on that platform.

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