If you  would like to avoid to set the background image of main view controller through Interface Builder, you can use a different way and delete the UIImageview object from Interface Builder:

Different way
Objective-C
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- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
  [super viewWillAppear:animated];
  self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"backgroundImage.jpg"]];
}

You may use viewDidLoad as well but viewWillAppear avoid some flickering. With Xcode 3.2.5 is not possible to use the pattern yet.

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