Possible to reuse UILabels on a scrollview?

Question

I'm trying to implement a view that shows a grid of information without using a UITableView, however, since I'm displaying about 36 different statistics, with its label I will have to initialize and use 72 UILabels. Does having so many UILabels mean that my iPhone app's performance will be significantly negatively affected? Is there a way to reuse some of the UILabels to decrease the number of UILabels that must be loaded at one time, or should I just resort to drawing everything on a surface instead?

Answer 1

First of all you should test the interface your thinking of and see if it takes a performance hit. Having a lot of labels all loaded at once will increase your memory footprint but depending on what else is going on in the app, it might not matter.

Secondly, you can't easily reuse the labels but it is possible. However, you would have to constantly monitor the displayed area of the scrollview and move the labels frames around as the view scrolled. I doubt you could do that efficiently. It would take a lot of coding in any case.

Thirdly, any grid like layout can be easily displayed in a table without making it look like a table. For example, the photopicker layout is a table but it looks like a bunch of icons on a white background. Another app I saw used a table to display paragraphs of text but it looked like an ordinary scrolling textview. Every row in a table can be customized to display exactly what you want. In principle, you could use a different cell for every row and they could all be unique in their height and contents.

The advantage of the table is the the table manages what is and is not on screen for you. It does reuse cells and their contents which makes them more efficient. The table also makes it easier to manage a lot of data.