Question: Please help with this issue that is driving me insane... 
I want to populate a table with coredata (in a UIViewcontroleer), not a UITableController, as I need the table to be small and not take the whole screen, 
I have tried different approaches, to no avail, and no answer to fix the problems,
Im adapting some code from tutorials that use the whole screen,
[example](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4506077/request-for-member-tableview-in-something-not-a-structure-or-union) problem, Request for member tableView in something not a structure or union

all my searches for code show the use in iphone with tableview, It would be awesome if you know of a sample for ipad with a view controller (not in split view), 
thanks in advance

Answer: 
Your error stems most likely from you using the `tableView` property which is not available in `UIViewController`. It's difficult to judge what you did wrong, did you implement the necessary `UITableViewDataSource` and `UITableViewDelegate` methods? If you implement these it's no problem to use a `UIViewController` with core data. But remember the `UITableViewController` does more than just fill the table, it also resizes the table view when the keyboard is shown. You'll have to do this yourself, too.
UITableView has a rowHeight property that you can set directly or via the delegate method tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath:.

UITableViewCell has a font property that you can set, to make the font smaller.

UITableView class ref says rowHeight is in points. If that means the same as points in NSFont, it should be easy to coordinate the two.

And of course you can resize the table view’s frame in IB.

So you ought to be able to get what you want using a UITableViewController.

As for the error, do you know what line is generating it? Have you set breakpoints to find out?