Product Details
Programming the iPhone User Experience

Programming the iPhone User Experience
By Toby Boudreaux

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Product Description

Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch not only feature the world's most powerful mobile operating system, they also usher in a new standard of human-computer interaction through gestural interfaces and multi-touch navigation. This book provides you with a hands-on, example-driven tour of UIKit, Apple's user interface toolkit, and includes common design patterns to help you create new iPhone and iPod Touch user experiences.

Using Apple's Cocoa Touch framework, you'll learn how to build applications that respond in unique ways when users tap, slide, swipe, tilt, shake, or pinch the screen. Programming the iPhone User Experience is a perfect companion to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, and provides the practical information you need to develop innovative applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, whether you're a CTO, developer, or UI/UX designer.

  • Understand the basics of the Cocoa Touch framework for building iPhone and iPod Touch applications
  • Learn theory and best practices for using Cocoa Touch to develop applications with engaging and effective user interfaces
  • Apply your knowledge of Objective-C to the iPhone/iPod Touch framework
  • Customize standard UIKit views according to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and usability principles
  • Learn patterns for handling user experience concerns outside of the interface, such as network- and location-awareness

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #269106 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-08-19
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 188 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Toby Boudreaux has been developing for Mac OS X using Objective-C and Cocoa since 2000. He has spoken at WWDC on the topic of Hybrid Cocoa/ Web applications - a very relevant topic for the iPhone. He is the CTO of of The Barbarian Group, an interactive/software shop based in the US. He focuses evenly on OS X/iPhone application development and Web development, and acts as a mentor to his team, liaison to his clients, and representative to the community.

Toby has authored and acted as technical editor for books and articles related to programming and specializes in Web development for consumer markets using open technologies and on Mac/iPhone development.

Customer Reviews

a few nice gems buried in there3
The book is short, and while it has quite a number of code samples buried within it, it has only a few real gems that I thought were worthwhile. If you're looking for code examples on how to do fancy UI things with the iPhone or iPod touch - don't go here. It's really more of a conceptual overview of what an iPhone user experience should be including categorizing some common elements and patterns in use.

In the code samples, I found a useful nugget: a tidbit on how to improve the app startup/loading experience, with code samples. Otherwise most of the code samples were almost more of a "hey look, I can do the same thing that Interface Builder does, except in code" and re-hashes of example code that you can find on the web or in Apple's sample code projects. I suppose it's a lot easier than screenshots illustrating how to replicate with Interface Builder. The fact that you could do many of these patterns with Interface Builder seemed to escape comment in the text.

In terms of something to think about for how you're going to set up a user experience, it gives some patterns and anti-patterns that complement Apple's iPhone HIG. I thought at a fairly high level, those were pretty good. I didn't agree with all of them, and some segments seemed to be so wishy washy as to be useless (like wether or not to use Core Data) - but some were good too.

I wouldn't run out to go get this book and read it, but if you're looking for a paper copy of another point of view on the UI patterns of designing iPhone applications, this book might be worthwhile for you.

A Good Overview of the True Challenges of iPhone UX4
This book is thin and it is a good point. It is not a book about UI (User Interface), but about User EXPERIENCE. If you want to see good and bad interface designs, there is no better place than the app store itself. Programming the iPhone User Experience is a very clever summary and extension to Apple's HIG. The code examples are the kind of examples I was expecting from an UX point of view: code that you should not forget to include into your app if you want it to be right. I would deeply recommend it.

Ok, not great. Kind of a let down1
I was expecting a book that had some new or advanced UI advice and basically it was a rehash of Apple materials. I don't think it was worth the 23.09 it was billed as and it is super SHORT. The first half is just review material from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. This same material is present in any number of books and I can not recommend it to anyone who is an iPhone developer.