I have an idea about an application that I want to build and Im new to iPhone/iPad development (but not new to development in other languages/frameworks such as .NET and Java). I want to layout some views on the screen so that they animate (slide in) from different directions into their places.

The question is about the strucuture of the application, if I have say 4 rectanglular areas on the screen that contain business data, such as contacts (name, photo, etc...) and they all take up different widths of the screen (say the first contact takes up one row of the screen, but the next 2 take up half the width of the next row each, and so on).

Should I create a custom view for the different sized contact views, (i.e. LargeCustomView and SmallCustomView, and any other special type that I make) or should it all be one type, say, CustomerDetailsView which could be stretched to fit at design time?

Also, if there were, say, 3 different instances of the same custom view on the one screen, are there 3 instances of the view controller also? Im a little confused about powering the data behind a view, can someone shed some light on this for me? Do I just set the properties (say an instance variable ContactForView) on the view controller for each instance?

Thanks for any help you can give

Cheers,

Mark