iOS app with a lot of text

Posted by rdurand on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by rdurand
Published on 2012-10-31T13:15:43Z Indexed on 2012/10/31 17:13 UTC
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I just asked a question on StackOverflow, but I'm thinking that a part of it belongs here, as questions about design pattern are welcomed by the faq.

Here is my situation. I have developed almost completely a native iOS app. The last section I need to implement is all the rules of a sport, so that's a lot of text. It has one main level of sections, divided in subsections, containing a lot of structured text (paragraphs, a few pictures, bulleted/numbered lists, tables). I have absolutely no problem with coding, I'm just looking for advice to improve and make the best design pattern possible for my app.

My first shot (the last one so far) was a UITableViewController containing the sections, sending the user to another UITableViewController with the subsections of the selected section, and then one strange last UITableViewController where the cells contain UITextViews, sections header help structure the content, etc.

What I would like is your advice on how to improve the structure of this section. I'm perfectly ready to destroy/rebuild the whole thing, I'm really lost in my design here.. As I said on SO, I've began to implement a UIWebView in a UIViewController, showing a html page with JQuery Mobile to display the content, and it's fine. My question is more about the 2 views taking the user to that content. I used UITableViewControllers because that's what seemed the most appropriate for a structured hierarchy like this one. But that doesn't seem like the best solution in term of user experience..

What structure / "view-flow" / kind of presentation would you try to implement in my situation?

As always, any help would be greatly appreciated!


Just so you can understand better the hierarchy, with a simple example :

                          -----> Section 1   -----> SubSection 1.1   -----> Content
                          |                  -----> SubSection 1.2   -----> Content
                          |                  -----> SubSection 1.3   -----> Content
                          |
                          |
                          |
UINavigationController  -------> Section 2   -----> SubSection 2.1   -----> Content
                          |                  -----> SubSection 2.2   -----> Content
                          |                  -----> SubSection 2.3   -----> Content
                          |                  -----> SubSection 2.4   -----> Content
                          |                  -----> SubSection 2.5   -----> Content
                          |
                          -----> Section 3   -----> SubSection 3.1   -----> Content
                                             -----> SubSection 3.2   -----> Content

                      |------------------|   |--------------------|  |-------------|
                  1 UITableViewController   3 UITableViewControllers  10 UIViewControllers
                         (3 rows)              (with different         with a UIWebView
                                                number of rows)

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