iPhone User Interface Design Projects [Paperback]

Joachim Bondo (Author), David Barnard (Author), Eddie Wilson (Author), Keith Peters (Author), Craig Kemper (Author), Dan Burcaw (Author), Tim Novikoff (Author), Chris Parrish (Author), Jurgen Siebert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1430223596 | ISBN-13: 978-1430223597 | Edition: 1

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 user interface.

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

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

Who this book is for

iPhone application developers of all experience levels and development platforms.

Table of Contents

1. App Cubby
2. Yet Another Google Reader
3. Brightkite for the iPhone
4. Outpost
5. TanZen and Zentomino
6. Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab
7. Postage
8. Falling Balls and Gravity Pods
9. FontShuffle
10. Snow Reports for the iPhone

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

A bio is not available for this author.

Keith Peters lives in the vicinity of Boston with his wife, Kazumi, and their daughter, Kristine. He has been working with Flash since 1999, and has co-authored many books for friends of ED, including Flash MX Studio, Flash MX Most Wanted, and the ground-breaking Flash Math Creativity. In 2001, he started the experimental Flash site, BIT-101 (BIT-101.com), which strives for a new, cutting edge, open-source experiment each day. The site won an award at the Flashforward 2003 Flash Film Festival in the Experimental category. In addition to the experiments on the site, there are several highly regarded Flash tutorials which have been translated into many languages and are now posted on web sites throughout the world. Keith is currently working full time doing freelance and contract Flash development and various writing projects.

Ingo Peters currently works with the HypoVereinsbank, a group of European banks managing Internet portals and applications. As a project manager, he has guided to success many different applications and Internet portals using Enterprise JavaBeans. He started programming with Enterprise JavaBeans in 1998.

Michael Kemper has managed and deployed interactive, video, and animation projects in every industry vertical for some of the world's largest companies. He has been recognized by eDesign magazine and has received numerous ADDY awards and Art Directors Club awards for interactive design and animation. Michael owns a creative consultancy (www.feedyourimage.com) in San Francisco, where he focuses on motion graphics and experience design for digital media. When he isn't working on client engagements, he spends much of his free time reading graphic novels and practicing digital photography.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430223596
• ISBN-13: 978-1430223597
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #859,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dave Mark is a long-time Mac developer and author and has written a number of books on Macintosh development, including Learn C on the Macintosh, The Macintosh Programming Primer series, and Ultimate Mac Programming. His blog can be found at www.davemark.com. Jeff LaMarche is a longtime Mac developer, and Apple iPhone Developer. With over 20 years of programming experience, he's written on Cocoa and Objective-C for MacTech Magazine, as well as articles for Apple's Developer Technical Services website. He has experience working in Enterprise software, both as a developer for PeopleSoft starting in the late 1990s, and then later as an independent consultant.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn from their successes - and failures. December 6, 2009

By G. Hughes

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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 Ju'rgen 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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read. Not a reference book. October 8, 2010

By Adiel Gonzalez

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this book thinking it was a interface design reference book. This is not an interface design reference book. This book shows how different developers and designers created their iPhone application. Each chapter is from a different company or developer. So basically you can read the book in any order that you want to. I read it chapter by chapter just to be organized. I read the entire book except chapter 9. Chapter 9 goes into details about fonts.

Having said that, I think every NEW developer on the iPhone should read this book. The experience of these developers is written down in the pages of this book. They speak about what worked, what didn't work and what they did in each case to make it work or fail. This will save you trial and error. There are a couple of chapters that stand out from the rest. I really liked the last chapter on the snow reports application.

One last thing to mention, if you are going to start developing on the iPhone, this should be your second book. First pick up a book on programming on the iPhone or Objective-C on the iPhone. This book will be more towards "polishing" your application and how to get it ready for the app store.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Misses the mark on so many levels January 21, 2011

By B. Smith

Format:Paperback

This book is a collection of "useful" tips for designing iPhone User Interfaces, but it comes up way short. This is just a random number of topics that are not tied together at all. There are a few Apress books that are good, but this is by far one of the worst ones I have read. I own about 10 Apress iPhone books, and this one probably ranks last. The chapters are not descriptive and reading through the book really did not give me any concrete insight. I really have no idea what audience this book was meant for, if any at all. This book is not worth the price. Save your money and your time, there are many better books out there.