Best approach for integrating custom graphics in iOS development - iphone

Question

What are the best references to read (online resources or books) to read about the approaches and techniques for integrating custom images, graphics, icons for iOS apps? (What are the best strategy to manage custom images for iOS development?)

Answer 1

Uh, ok, not sure if you need super high level OpenGL graphics performance but if you're making ordinary iPhone apps (not games), then maybe these starter knowledge can guide you.
This is from my own limited experience but there are two types of graphics that I distinguish: graphics that are packaged with the app and graphics that are loaded through some network or file on the device.
For graphics that are packaged with the app, these tend to be the buttons and backgrounds for the look and feel of an app.
With these kind of graphics, to display an image to your application, the general idea is you create a UIImageView then add it as a subview of your View Controller's view. You then tell your image view object the image you want to display.
// create the image view object to display the image
UIImageView *myImageView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,0,100,100)];
// tell the image view object the image you want to display
[myImageView setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"mybutton.png"]];
// add the image view object to your view controller's view
[self.view addSubview:myImageView];
[myImageView release];
As for network images, I usually get the URL of the image I want to display, then use a image caching library such as SDWebImage to load the image like so:
NSURL *url = [[NSURL alloc] initWithString:#"http://www.mysite.com/images/myphoto.png"];
[myImageView imageWithURL:urlOfImage placeholder:[UIImage imageNamed:#"placeholder.png"]];
[url release];
How you get the URL path to your image from the network is a different matter though. If you're loading through a web service, you usually have to fetch it from the JSON or XML output.