Product Description

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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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8394 in Books
• Brand: Apress
• Published on: 2009-08-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.03 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781430223573
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
A biography for this author is not available.

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Customer Reviews

Worth buying, but can be hit and miss
It's an attractive, slim book with plenty of full color graphics. There are probably enough tips, tricks, and 'from the trenches' stories to justify a place on most iPhone developers' shelves.

I think the book would have been better with a more consistent overall style/structure. Most of the example code is too large and involved to bother inputting yourself, yet there are many, very basic, pictures showing IB connections etc. The code is available for download and I'd expect a book at this level to provide:

- the code itself (yes, on the website)
- class diagrams* or at least some form of architecture diagrams for each project (not really; depends on the chapter)
- detailed discussion of problems encountered, alternatives considered, blocked avenues etc (also hit and miss)
- specific discussion of code snippets (yes, this is covered fairly well)
- a comprehensive appendix of references, or links on the website (no, though you can glean a reasonable amount from the chapters)

[*yes, you can generate class diagrams in Xcode but I'm thinking along the lines of storyboard/whiteboard, "how we got here" views, as well as simply outlining what the demo is and what it does]

Six of the seven chapters deal with real world projects, or working cut-downs. The threading chapter is, for me, the weakest since it uses a toy problem just to illustrate threading, is poorly explained and smacks of 'solution in need of a problem'. Given that it walks the user through the whole setup of IB connections etc I fear that it may be handing a loaded gun to some people who would be well advised to look for ways to avoid threading (or at least not write to common data), rather than dive in with threading. It would have been possible to present a small, real world problem, that legitimately called for a threaded solution without too much effort.

The code I've seen is based on 2.2.1, so you'll probably need to do some tweaking. There is breadth and depth so it's hard to imagine someone coming away without learning something. For $27 or so it's a good deal and a step in the right direction for post-beginner iPhone dev books.

Your next step in iPhone SDK programming
I have to admit I initially overlooked what a great book it is, given its meager 200-page content ;)
When I got the book, I thought: oh nice paper and colorful prints. But maybe it just looks fancy instead of offering real substance.
I was wrong. Once I started reading, I couldn't put the book off. While reading it, it's both satisfying and addictive at the same time.
All the chapter authors have practical real-world experience building successful iPhone apps.
They showed you complete working programs while demonstrating their experience and expertise in their respective fields.

Wolfgang Ante - Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game
It shows you how a little game is built from concept to finish, with complete game flow, handling on different logic/paths, and how to use Quartz and Core Animation to build simple animations w/o using Open GL ES. I really liked how he also revealed his thought-processing in designing the game.

Mike Ash - Mike Ash's Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
Peer-to-Peer networking using Bonjour is very interesting. Mike not only showed how Bonjour/CFNetwork works, but also went ahead to build out a simple yet effective network protocol to demonstrate his point. It's very thought-provoking and reminded me poking UNIX networking stuff back in my college days. I'm very eager to try out some p2p trick in my next app after reading this chapter!

Gary Bennett - Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
This chapter is a bit *easy*. It shows you how to work with multiple threads, and showed a simple program to demonstrate different points.
However, I was expecting some more *real-world* app, instead of a toy program.

Matthew "Canis" Rosenfeld - All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation
Matt has done a wonderful job in explaining how to handle gesture events in great details, as well as how to make the decision of what events to use during his design of Stage Hand. This is a great chapter for anyone who wants to design how to capture their own custom gesture events.

Benjamin Jackson - Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
Cocos2d is a very popular physics game engine on iPhone. Ben leads us to the door in this chapter. Cocos2d along deserves a whole book for it.
I really would like to have more content on this chapter. 20 pages just don't cut it ;)

Neil Mix - Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
Neil has a great piece in explaining how to design an effective audio streaming algorithm in this chapter. Coming from the Pandora team, I expect nothing but greatness from his experience and expertise. Handling slow network and dropped connection are very interesting to read.

Steven Peterson - Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite
This is a good chapter, comparing to others in the book. Probably I've already built apps using CoreLocation, XML Parsing and SQLite, I find it an easy read. But it's still pretty good in showing you how to build an app from start to finish.

Overall, this little book offers more value than many 600-plus-pages of bible-books out there on the market.
I highly recommend it to anyone who's passed the initial iPhone SDK programming newbie stage, and ready to take on more advanced features.
I just wish this book would contain more chapters and more interesting topics. Hopefully APress can come out with a new edition?

Good threading and multitouch walkthroughs...
iPhone Cool Projects is a very broad and deep iPhone development composition. The book is broken into 7 chapters, which are roughly 20-25 pages in length.

For new iPhone developers, Apress provides the source code for each chapter's project to help those of us that like to learn by seeing the code work, and only then decomposing it into various pieces for learning purposes.

Without going into gross detail, I mainly bought the book to gain some insight into threading, multitouch interface design, audio streaming. For brevity, I'll limit my assessment to threading only. The chapter opens by describing the taxonomy of threading and several keywords such as thread, process, multitasking, synchronization, deadlock, etc. After the description, the chapter walks you through the steps AND color graphics of each of the XCode screens. There are LOTS of diagrams to explain the setup and the arrangement of threads in the example project as well. In the past, when books have very intense globs of code, there is something lost when attempting to explain each line. iPhone Cool Projects actually does a decent job of walking through the connections to UIControl objects and completing tasks such as an event processing loop or implementing a critical section.

If you are a skeptic and want to see more before committing to purchasing this book, the publisher has generously provided a sample chapter (Chapter 5) to entice you to buy.