iPhone User Interface Design Projects Review

Love it or loathe it, the iPhone and iPod touch have been a stunning success, largely due to the App Store -- over 100,000 apps at current count. It is, by all accounts, the largest gold rush to invade the application development scene since ... well, ever. Apps that pay attention to design and usability stand out from the rest of the detritus, and quickly become a success.

"iPhone User Interface Design Projects" devotes a single chapter to each of ten developers/designers who've stood out from the crowd. They talk us through their thought processes and workflows, their failures and ultimate successes. You can teach someone to write code, but can you teach something as subjective as interface design? Apple's "Human Interface Guidelines" document goes some way to achieving this goal, explaining what users expect from an iPhone app's interface, and how the various controls behave and interact. The HIG is an essential reference and fits the bill perfectly for most use cases, but doesn't offer insights into more creative interfaces. "iPhone User Interface Design Projects" augments the HIG by bringing the authors' experiences into the discussion. They explain what worked and what didn't - there's nothing like learning from other people's mistakes.

A common thread throughout the book is that design and usability is an iterative process - very rarely will your first design concept reach the App Store. Though the individual authors refer to it differently - wireframing, prototyping, mock-ups, etc. - you get a sense for the importance of knowing what the interface will look like and how it will behave before committing it to code. The book's technical reviewer, Joachim Bondo, contributes a chapter on the design of a prospective Google news reader. Refreshing in presentation, this isn't a post-development retrospective. As he explains in the chapter's introduction, he has a few ideas in his head, and he fleshes the designs out as your read along. You don't get to see the final interface, but that's not the point. What you do get is insight into his design decisions. Bret Victor presented the excellent "Prototyping iPhone User Interfaces" at WWDC '09, and Bondo's narrative is very similar in content.

Though I enjoyed (almost) all ten contributions, Chapter 7, for me, was the highlight of the book. Chris Parrish and Brad Ellis cover - in great detail - often overlooked concepts of user context and application flow, and the undeniable value of prototyping and specifications. Parrish and Ellis rightly won an Apple Design Award at WWDC '09 for "Postage", a visual and highly intuitive postcard creator, and they approach their chapter with similar attention to detail.

The odd-one-out is Jurgen Siebert's detailed discussion of typefaces, the implications of their usage on small-scale devices such as the iPhone, and a walkthrough of his "FontShuffle" app. As informative as the history and anatomy of typefaces was for me, I didn't see how it specifically related to the very restricted set of fonts on the iPhone. Siebert even goes so far as to mock up a Contacts screen with a font that isn't available on the device, suggesting that the screen's readability has improved as a result. I don't disagree; however, the iPhone's fonts are baked-in, and unless you want to implement a custom glyph rendering routine, it's a pointless argument on a closed device. This chapter represents a missed opportunity, in my opinion. I was initially looking forward to reading about the author's choice of available fonts under different scenarios, but was ultimately let down.

Where the book falls short is in its use of black and white screeenshots throughout. We're talking about the design of applications which are displayed on a full colour device. Colour clearly plays a very large part in the design of any user interface, so cheaping out with black and white screenshots was a mistake. What's even more unforgivable is that the downloadable eBook (which isn't free) doesn't have full colour plates! Come on, Apress! I think given the context of the book, we'd be prepared to pay a bit more for colour.

Who's this book for? Everyone who develops or designs for iPhone, novice to expert alike. Even if you've had success on the App Store, I guarantee there's something in here for you.

iPhone User Interface Design Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430223597
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Rating :

Price : $39.99

Offer Price : $22.25

Overviews

With over 100,000 iPhone applications and 125,000 registered iPhone developers, is it still possible to create a top-selling app that stands apart from the six-figure crowd? Of course, but you’ll need more than a great idea and flawless code—an eye-catching and functional user interface design is essential. With this book, you’ll get practical advice on user interface design from 10 innovative developers who, like you, have sat wondering how to best utilize the iPhone’s minimal screen real estate. Their stories illustrate precisely why, with more apps and more experienced, creative developers, no iPhone app can succeed without a great UI.

Whatever type of iPhone project you have in mind—social networking app, game, or reference tool—you’ll benefit from the information presented in this book. More than just tips and pointers, you’ll learn from the authors’ hands-on experiences, including:

• Dave Barnard of App Cubby on how to use Apple’s User Interface conventions and test for usability to assure better results
• Joachim Bondo, creator of Deep Green Chess, beats a classic design problem of navigating large dataset results in the realm of the iPhone
• Former Apple employee Dan Burcaw tailors user interfaces and adds the power of CoreLocation, Address Book, and Camera to the social networking app, Brightkite
• David Kaneda takes his Basecamp project management client, Outpost, from a blank page (literally) to a model of dashboard clarity
• Craig Kemper focuses on the smallest details to create his award-winning puzzle games TanZen and Zentomino
• Tim Novikoff, a graduate student in applied math with no programming experience, reduces a complex problem to simplicity in Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab
• Long-time Mac developer Chris Parrish goes into detail on the creation of the digital postcard app, Postage, which won the 2009 Apple Design Award
• Flash developer Keith Peters provides solutions for bringing games that were designed for a desktop screen to the small, touch-sensitive world of the iPhone
• Jürgen Siebert, creator of FontShuffle, outlines the anatomy of letters and how to select the right fonts for maximum readability on the iPhone screen
• Eddie Wilson, an interactive designer, reveals the fine balance of excellent design and trial-by-fire programming used to create his successful app Snow Report

Combined with Apress’ best-selling Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, you’ll be prepared to match great code with striking design and create the app that everyone is talking about.

What you’ll learn

• Optimize your design for the iPhone’s limited screen real estate and the mobile environment
• Create a user interface that is eye-catching and stands apart from the crowd
• Maximize your use of typographic elements for style and readability
• Perfect entry views and display large amounts of data in an exciting way
• Translate games made for the desktop’s big screen to the iPhone
• Strike the perfect balance between simplicity, beauty, and features

Who is this book for?

iPhone application developers of all experience levels and development platforms

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Customer Review

Sexy design sells! - H. Wu - Brooklyn, NY USA
Apple's iPhone SDK/Cocoa Touch framework provides some very elegant UI widgets out of the box. It's a beautiful thing when you design your app's interface, and it comes great-looking already. However, us programmers tend to be lacking skills in interactive design and awesome usability. This book comes in for the rescue.

Authors of this book have been to the trenches, and they wrote their own experiences and their thought processes here in their chapters. It's amazing how a little app has so much design decisions involved.
Chapter 1 - How and why design apps that have similar look and feel like the default built-in Apple apps, and some tips on whether to tap or not, and usability testing.
Chapter 2 - The author takes on the Google news reader, and improves the navigation and re-structured his app design to be more efficient.
Chapter 3 - The author talks about the differences between web and native apps, and some best practices and tricks
Chapter 4 - The author shows how the design evolved along with design decisions and adjustments
Chapter 5 - This is my favorite chapter. The author discuss in depth of how to design UI interactions with iPhone's unique size and features. The discussion on rotations is especially thought-provoking!
Chapter 6 - This chapter shows that even designing a very simple and basic app, it still takes consideration on usability and appropriate user interactions.
Chapter 7 - This chapter is great in showing you many ways to tune your app details into great enhancements to your apps. Little details you would otherwise take for granted or ignored.
Chapter 8 - As a programmer, I'm happy to see some codes behind the app. This chapter shows you how to build a simple but interesting game, with the focus of how to receive user interactions with minimal efforts. Codes are provided so it's a great read!
Chapter 9 - The author talks about different font styles and typefaces.
Chapter 10 - The author shows us many tips and tricks during the entire app development life cycle.

Overall, this book shows us how iPhone apps are developed from a different angle. Many great tips/tricks and real-world experiences. It's a great read w/ about 240 pages. Any iPhone programmer would learn a thing or two from this book. My only complain is that some chapters are too short. Hopefully 2nd edition of this book can include additional iPhone app designers/developers :)

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Apr 28, 2010 07:11:13

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iPhone Cool Projects

iPhone Cool Projects Review

When reading introductory books in any language, it is easy to learn the language elements and concepts, but it is hard to see how everything fits together. What is great about the cool projects series from Apress is being able to see the elements and concepts in practice with projects from professionals who are active in the field.

Each chapter is written by a different author, so every project covers a different experience and topic. These range from touch interfaces to streaming audio over the network. Some of the projects presented are based on the author's live applications that are currently available through the App Store. A wide range of the topics are covered in the book with practical examples of the concepts.

This book is definitely not an introduction to Cocoa or iPhone programming. It is more geared toward the intermediate reader who has learned the basics and needs practical, real-life examples. It can also be of use to a more experienced iPhone programmer who wants to explore some of the topics in the book without having to dig through the documentation.

I would highly recommend this book because it is easy to read and does not get bogged down with basic concepts. Code is provided on the book's site and is easy to follow the code with the explanations in the book. As a beginning iPhone programmer, I found this book to be a lot of help to work out some of the concepts I was having trouble with.

iPhone Cool Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430223573
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Rating :

Price : $39.99

Offer Price : $13.92

Overviews

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing field—developers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed! To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba's Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer application—a topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think “collisions”). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can't see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications.

Who is this book for?

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform

Summary of Contents

1. Wolfgang Ante - Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game
2. Mike Ash - Mike Ash’s Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
3. Gary Bennett - Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
4. Matthew “Canis” Rosenfeld - All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation
5. Benjamin Jackson - Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
6. Neil Mix - Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
7. Steven Peterson - Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite

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Customer Review

Poorly Written - Christopher Morris -
I bought this book because I wanted to see code that successful iPhone developers had written. I guess I was looking for "best practices" sort of information and I was hoping that I might get insight on how to tackle some problems I have run into when developing my own applications.

Book Flow

The biggest disappointment in this book is that developers wrote it (I am assuming). The book lacks the continuity you would normally find when one or two people collaborate on an entire book. When a different person writes each chapter, you get seven different styles in this book. I found a couple of the chapters very well written, but the rest I found to be, well, written by developers. I'm not saying that developers are inherently bad at writing, but it takes a certain something to relay information to other developers effectively. Most of the writers of this book just do not have it.

Code Samples

I got very frustrated reading chapters with code snippets from applications the various authors had written. If a working application had been available to provide context to the snippets, then I would have been less frustrated. For example, in Chapter 5, the first 12 pages of the chapter provide code snippets with very brief explanations of what the code is supposed to do. No working example is provided for context. I couldn't even play with the code to see what was going on. It was almost like I was expected just to know the context because I was on the team that wrote the application. The last 10 pages actually create a working sample. I would have rather spent the entire chapter creating the application with better explanations of each step and theory behind the code.

Proofreading

I wish I had a dollar for all the typos I've seen in this book. Again, in chapter 5, page 118 there is a screen shot of the application the author wrote. The caption says it's a screen shot of the application that you will be writing at the end of the chapter. Sloppy.

Conclusion

I feel like I did get some useful information from this book. Was it worth the frustration of reading poorly written text, no context for code snippets, and numerous errors? Not in my opinion.

Looks good on paper, but the devil's in the details - David Ruedger -
I bought this after seeing the high reviews from others on this site. Unfortunately, the content doesn't quite live up to the hype for me. I got this in particular wanting more details about threading having come from the Windows world where I have implemented very robust networking applications that require UI responsiveness while results are cached in the background. I was hoping this book would shed some light on how to go about doing this in the iPhone paradigm, but the example is so rudimentary that it almost isn't even worth putting into the book. Plus, the instructions for building the app are incorrect and contain glaring omissions as well as references to code objects that don't even exist. What's worse is the code itself as listed in the book doesn't even run when built! It causes an unhandled exception due to objects created in the header file not being instantiated or initialized in the implementation file. And no where in the chapter does it say you must download the source code for the example. It walks you through it as if it has been checked and is guaranteed to work as printed. Once you download the source code, it becomes apparent how rushed or poorly thought through this portion of the book was. Whole sections of the header and implementation files are glaringly omitted from the book. Did Bennett even bother proofreading this part of the book, and if so, where were the editors in this process? It's shameful for a book that is marketed as a technical tome to increase a developer's proficiency on the platform.

I'll admit that I haven't delved into other parts of the book in great detail, but the game portion did look pretty interesting at first glance. However, the hands on experience I had with the threading chapter left a very bad first impression and does not leave me all too optimistic on either the usefulness or accuracy of the additional content in the book.

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