Chapter 11. Media: images and the camera
This chapter covers
- Accessing and manipulating images
- Using the iPhone camera
- Creating a simple collage application
So far, our focus has mainly been on text. Sure, we’ve displayed the occasional UIImage, such as the mountain drawing in the previous chapter, but we’ve considered only the simplest means for doing so.
The iPhone offers an experience that’s potentially much richer and more engaging. A camera, a microphone, a complete library of photos, and a speaker are just some of the utilities built into the iPhone. Less the camera, the iPad contains all the aforementioned libraries and features that the iPhone does. In this chapter and the next, we’ll look at these features as part of a general exploration of media. We’ll provide deep coverage of images as well as using the iPhone’s camera.
More complex questions are beyond the scope of this chapter. We’re saving the topic of image editing for a later chapter, when we look at the iPhone’s graphic libraries.
We’ve touched on using images a few times, beginning in chapter 4, where one of the earliest SDK examples included an image. You’ve always created a UIImageView in Interface Builder, attached it to a filename, and not worried about the details.
We’re now ready to consider the details. We’ll look at some of the options available when you dive into Xcode, rather than depending on Interface Builder’s higher-level abstractions.