iPhone Advanced Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Paperback]

Dylan Bruzenak (Author), Ben Smith (Author), Joachim Bondo (Author), Owen Goss (Author), Peter Honeder (Author), Ray Kiddy (Author), Steve Finkelstein (Author), Tom Harrington (Author), Jonathan Saggau (Author), Noel Llopis (Author), Joe Pezzillo (Author), Florian Pflug (Author), David Mark (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1430224037 | ISBN-13: 978-1430224037 | Edition: 1

As the fourth book in our series of iPhone Projects based on the work and experiences of iPhone, this volume takes on the more advanced aspects of iPhone development. The first generation of iPhone applications has hit the App Store, and now it's time to optimize performance, streamline the user interface, and make every successful iPhone app just that much more sophisticated.

Paired with Apress's bestselling Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, you'll have everything you need to create the next great iPhone app that everyone is talking about.

• Optimize performance.
• Streamline your user interface.
• Do things with your iPhone app that other developers haven't attempted.

Along with series editor Dave Mark, your guides for this exploration of the next level of iPhone development, include:

• Ben “Panda” Smith, discussing particle systems using OpenGL ES
• Joachim Bondo, demonstrating his implementation of correspondence gaming in the most recent version of his chess application, Deep Green.
• Tom Harrington implementing streaming audio with Core Audio, one of many iPhone OS 3 APIs.
• Owen Goss debugging those pesky errors in your iPhone code with an eye toward achieving professional-strength results.
• Dylan Bruzenak building a data-driven application with SQLite.
• Ray Kiddy illustrating the full application development life cycle with Core Data.
• Steve Finkelstein marrying an offline e-mail client to Core Data.
• Peter Honeder and Florian Pflug tackling the challenges of networked applications in WiFi environments.
• Jonathan Saggau improving interface responsiveness with some of his personal tips and tricks, including “blocks” and other esoteric techniques.
• Joe Pezzillo pushing the frontiers of APNS, the new in iPhone OS 3 Apple Push Notification Service that makes the cloud the limit for iPhone apps.
• Noel Llopis taking mere programmers into a really advanced developmental adventure into the world of environment mapping with OpenGL ES.

What you’ll learn

• How to use Wi-Fi to do more than simply connect to the Internet.
• How to communicate with other iPhone users in real time.
• How to take advantage of all the tricks built into Cocoa touch.
• How to convert your iPhone and iPod touch apps for use in other environments.
• How to convert your other mobile apps for use with iPhone and iPod touch.

Who this book is for

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform, though this title is the natural choice after any of the other iPhone Projects books.

Table of Contents

1. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Particle Systems
2. Chess on the ’Net: Correspondence Gaming with Deep Green
3. Audio Streaming: An Exploration into Core Audio
4. You Go Squish Now! Debugging on the iPhone
5. Building Data-Driven Applications with Active Record and SQLite
6. Core Data and Hard-Core Design
7. Smart In-Application E-mail with Core Data and Three20
8. How iTap Tackles the Challenges of Networking
9. Fake It ’Til You Make It: Tips and Tricks for Improving Interface Responsiveness
10. Demystifying the Apple Push Notification Service
11. Environment Mapping and Reflections with OpenGL ES

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dave Mark is a longtime Mac developer and author who has written a number of books on Mac and iOS development, including Beginning iPhone 4 Development (Apress, 2010), More iPhone 3 Development (Apress, 2010), Learn C on the Mac (Apress, 2008), The Macintosh Programming Primer series (Addison-Wesley, 1992), and Ultimate Mac Programming (Wiley, 1995). Dave loves the water and spends as much time as possible on it, in it, or near it. He lives with his wife and three children in Virginia.

A bio is not available for this author.

Ben Britten Smith has been writing software on Apple platforms for 15 years. Most notably, he was given an Academy Award for technical achievement for his feature film work with Mac-based suspended camera control systems. Lately, he has switched his efforts from the big screen to the small screen.

His first iPhone game, SnowDude, was published to the App Store a few months after the software development kit became available. Since then, he has written a dozen apps for various clients, including the games Snowferno, the award winning Mole—Quest for the Terracore Gem, and the Gamebook Adventures series. Ben lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, Leonie, and their pet bunnies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (November 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430224037
• ISBN-13: 978-1430224037
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #825,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Too Many Mistakes to be Useful December 31, 2009

By Clifford Sharp

Format:Paperback

I DO NOT recommend this book at all for any level of iPhone developer(s).

One of the projects actually just takes an Apple code example and adds a few methods here and there. I don't have to buy a book to do that. One project adds some methods and ivar's to files that are generated files per Core Data. This is always a bad idea.

There are many mistakes in the source code in the book. The source code in the book doesn't match the downloadable source code in many places. The downloadable source code fails to build and is missing files. I found such obvious errors in the downloadable source like no semicolon at the end of some of the lines. This code was obviously never built and/or tested.

This book was very poorly and hastily put together. Don't waste your money, but more importantly, don't waste your time.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for any serious iPhone developers! December 19, 2009

By H. Wu

Format:Paperback

As the name suggested, this book talks about advanced iPhone programming topics. Each of the 11 chapters packs loads of information and real world experience from the authors. You will actually spend more time to digest the information than just reading it. Highly recommended to experienced and seasoned iPhone developers, but also offers quite some insights for developers new to the iPhone scene. You will be amazed on how much you can learn from the authors of the book. And lots of code samples throughout the book, you won't be disappointed.

Chapter 1 - Great introduction to the particle system, the very basic element for many types of games.
Chapter 2 - Interesting coverage on how to build a networked app/game, with the help of Google's free App Engine service using Python.
Chapter 3 - Using Core Audio to do audio streaming. This chapter is quite hardcore for me, but I was able to follow through and learned quite a lot about how audio streaming works and some tricks as well.
Chapter 4 - This chapter is right on the money - debugging! The author showed a few different approaches when debugging your iPhone apps.
Chapter 5 - This chapter covers basic SQLite operations in your codes. Currently there's no Objective-C delegate/wrappers for SQLite operations, so everything is in C fashion. There are other frameworks for a better interface with SQLite.
Chapter 6 - If you don't like dealing with SQLite, with the introduction of iPhone SDK 3.0, you can use Core Data :) This chapter shows you how Core Data and KVC protocol works.
Chapter 7 - How to send emails from your apps w/o going to the email client. The author shows both online and offline modes, as well as a nice introduction to three20 framework....
Chapter 8 - This chapter talks about networking issues, sockets, wifi detection, power management, etc. Also some insights if you want to roll out your own networking protocol stacks.
Chapter 9 - This is my favorite chapter talking about how to design an effective and responsive user interface. NSOperation and NSOperationQueue are covered, as well as tips & tricks on how to display large amount of data w/o slowing down.
Chapter 10 - Very nice introduction to Apple's push notification service, including both setup steps and server side scripts.
Chapter 11 - Mapping and Reflection on OpenGL ES. This is a brief introduction to OpenGL ES environment mapping and reflection. I wish this chapter is longer and has more coverage in depth. But again, this is not an OpenGL ES book, the topic itself deserves a whole other book.

Overall, this book is pretty advanced in many aspects of the iPhone SDK frameworks. Coverage on SDK 3.0 frameworks are much welcomed and the competence of the authors are undeniable. Again, I highly recommend this book to any iPhone developer, no matter how seasoned you are, you will learn a thing or two from this book. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Some valuable material May 11, 2012

By Giovanni Dienstmann

Format:Paperback

First of all, I must say that this book is old, based on Xcode 3.x and iOS 3.x. I also haven`t read the whole book, but only some chapters that interested me.
Having said that, I have mixed feelings about this book. Some chapters present good resources and in depth discussions about advanced programming topics hard to find elsewhere; others are just general (and incomplete) overviews of some subjects.
My advice is: check the table of contents and, if you find a chapter or two that cover a topic you like, buy it.

6 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Rocked November 24, 2009

By CodeFree

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Book was fantastic , actual useful and interesting topics, though some of the source did have bugs and leaks. Worth the price