What is JSON? JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It’s a super lightweight and human readable data format. Go check it out and run back here.
iOS 5 includes classes to deal with JSON natively. Which is awesome. Let’s do this!
Twitter has a service that gives you recent tweets in JSON format when you give it a URL. Like this:
https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=jmenter&count=10
That’ll give you my 10 most recent tweets in JSON format. Easy peasy. Let’s make an app.
In Xcode, New Project, Single View Application. Use ARC. Coolio.
Add a UITableView to the view. Add it as a property to the ViewController, add the data source and delegate and wire those up.
Add some methods to the ViewController.m: one to issue a request and one to handle it. Fix up the data source and delegate methods.
Done. This was not really a tutorial. Sorry to trick you.
Get the Xcode project here, check out the ViewController.m, and see how easy it is!