Styling Custom Cells

Episode #385 | 15 minutes | published on April 5, 2019 | Uses swift-4.2, Xcode-10.1

Subscribers Only

In this episode we add our tableview cell styling to match the design, using autolayout to arrange the views and using the Xcode View Debugger to find and fix a visual glitch when using dark background cells.

This episode is part of a series: Making a Podcast App From Scratch.

1. Intro 1 min

2. New Project Setup & Theming 14 min

3. Storyboard References 5 min

4. Reusable Views 10 min

5. Styling Custom Cells 15 min

6. Working with Remote Images 16 min

7. Creating an API Client 18 min

8. Parsing JSON into Models 15 min

9. Displaying Search Results and Recommendations 25 min

10. Parsing RSS and Atom Feeds 29 min

11. Podcast Detail Screen 27 min

12. Custom Gradient Background 13 min

13. Padded Label and Separator View 11 min

14. Making a Custom Subscribe Button 16 min

15. Refactoring to a Data Manager 26 min

16. Adding Episode Cells 27 min

17. Polish and Cleanup 23 min

18. Setting up Core Data to Save Subscriptions 24 min

19. Player Screen 27 min

20. Audio Playback 24 min

Creating a View Model for our Cells

struct SearchResultViewModel {
    let artworkUrl: URL?
    let title: String
    let author: String
}

We can now use this in our cell subclass to configure the views.

// in SearchResultCell.swift
func configure(with result: SearchResultViewModel) {
    podcastTitleLabel.text = result.title
    podcastAuthorLabel.text = result.author
    // image download will come later
}

Styling the Cell

We can configure a lot of the styling in the storyboard, however we want to be able to reference the theme's color constants.

override func awakeFromNib() {
    super.awakeFromNib()

    backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray4
    backgroundView = UIView()
    backgroundView?.backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray4

    podcastTitleLabel.textColor = Theme.Colors.gray0
    podcastAuthorLabel.textColor = Theme.Colors.gray1
}

This looks good until you tap on a cell. The selected style makes the labels unreadable.

To fix this, we'll add this to the awakeFromNib() method.

    selectedBackgroundView = UIView()
    selectedBackgroundView?.backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray3

Configuring the Table View

For the tableView separator, we can customize the color and indentation, as well as the background color for the overall view:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    tableView.backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray4
    tableView.separatorColor = Theme.Colors.gray3
    tableView.separatorInset = .zero
}

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