WebView - loadHTMLString - synchronously?

Question

I just refactored my app so the initial view is a webview with controls placed on it. The html for the webview is in a file bundled with the app. I have a Default.png that appears while the app loads -- it's essentially a screenshot of the initial screen. When my initial view was a "regular" UIView, it replaced the screenshot when the app loads somewhat invisibly -- you didn't notice the switch. Now that I have a webView, I'm loading the content in the viewController's loadView, and the view replaces the screenshot before the html content has loaded -- so I get a white view with controls for a half-second before the html is is done loading.
So I'd like to have that loadHTMLString load synchronously -- I've used the webView's delegate method didFinishLoading (or whatever it is) in other places where I control the view transition -- I get a request to go to another view, load the HTML, then display the view. But in this case (and with another view controller that is on the tabbar), I don't control that. I've tried to load the html in the viewController's init, but at that point my webView doesn't exist yet. I've tried loading the content in loadView using a separate thread and waiting in the current thread with a while loop that does a [NSThread sleepForTimeInterval] until the content is loaded, but it locks things up - apparently sleepForTimeInterval doesn't allow other threads to get cpu time?
It's unacceptable as it is. Any ideas how I might get the content pre-loaded before the webView displays itself?
Thanks,
Brian McLaughlin

Answer 1

Ok, that makes more sense. The viewWillAppear and viewDidAppear methods are UIViewController methods, so they wouldn't be used in a UIWebView subclass.
You might consider taking the logic for the content out of the view and put it in a model class. Then the controller is responsible for creating the model and requesting the data and loading it into the view.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/Coco aDesignPatterns/chapter5_section4.html