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Closed 11 years ago.
I think I have just about mastered the basics of iPhone programming and now I want to make my apps look better.
Every time I show my family/friends what I have done they think it looks a little "basic". I am inclined to agree
I know how to customise the table view but apart from that everything I make just looks a bit "appy". All the books I have just cover the basics. There's nothing in there that looks amazing.
I know this is a very vague question but I really need to make things look better.
Do I have to be good at art?
I have heard of people using custom designs in Quartz composer, is this how they do it?
Thanks
Good iPhone apps do not look like "art". They look like the standard Apple apps included with the phone. The real "art" to UI design is following the standard conventions of your platform. It's unimportant if your application looks "basic"; the really important things are that it's functional and easy to use. This is something Apple gets right in a big way, and it pays off for them handsomely.
Study the apps on your phone to see how they do things, and then follow those patterns. User testing (even if it's just with your friends and family) is exactly the right thing to do. If your program is powerful and useful enough, they won't be concerned that it looks a little basic. In fact, that can be a real advantage. The more complicated something is, the harder it is for someone to pick up and figure out how to use it right out of the box. The average iPhone user doesn't have a very long attention span, and with as many apps as are available on the App Store, it's hard to blame them for not wasting much time.
While I agree with #Cody, good UI/UX is not art, art does have a place. Art does not take the place of a good UI but does add to it. Not to much art, art needs to be a background part of the app. Backgrounds, icons, button backgrounds, etc.
If you, like me, can not make the art part, hire an artist--if the revenue will support that.
Finally, an artist is not by nature a UX designer, these are usually two different types of people.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I wish to build an iPhone app, but I've never ventured into anything like this before, appart from the very basics of HTML. I want to know how difficult it will be to create this app, if you really need someone pro to do it, or if it's managable to learn by a newbie.
The app:
Basicly the app works as a notepad AND a dictaphone. You should be able to create posts, which you can give a headline, write text, record sound, add searchwords and save.
All these posts should be listed by date, with the ability to search through them, using the given searchwords.
That's it. How difficult do you think this will be to accomplish?
If you believe this will be doable by a newbie, where do I start?
(I don't have access to a Mac computer to do the work on, so can I create everything on my windows PC, and transfer the project to someone else to compile and so on?)
Btw, don't be too technical in your reply, because I really don't know much about this topic, that's why I'm asking your help, to see if I should just trash the idea all together.
I'm not sure this question can be "answered". It's to subjective. I will offer a few words of advice though.
You can develop the app. It will be hard and take a lot of
dedication. If you love to learn new tools, new programming
languages, new operating system APIs - and love the challenge of
programming; then you should absolutely give it a whirl.
If you're concerned about time to market, then you'll have to hire professionals.
This app pretty much already exists. Review similar apps already for sale and ask yourself if you or the team you assemble can build something better. If you can't, by all means build it for fun; but don't publish it.
Doing this without a Mac will be next to impossible unless you explore things like Appcelerator Titanium.
Best of luck!
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am looking for a good well designed iOS code/framework that is open sourced out there that I can study on. What I mean good design is, they follow good object oriented concepts, code is clean, and organized, possibly has some unit testing in it as well. I wanted to learn these concepts and apply it to my projects as well. Any suggestions are appreciated
Apple provides some great sample code.
Additionally, I suggest looking at the abundance of iOS code available on code sharing sites such as GitHub. There's some great work done by some StackOverflow members. Marcus Zarra and Dave DeLong are two such people. I've also posted some code up there as well. Just so you know, a lot of code posted on GitHub are not complete projects, but libraries or useful classes.
There's also the Three20 framework, published by Facebook.
At risk of shameless self plugging, here's a project I wrote that's overly commented and fairly simple. The app is a "speed dial" for iPhone. Set a number, flip a switch and you don't need to jump into the phone app to tap on a number in favorites anymore. One tap dialing right from your home screen. I've got two apps based on this code that are out on the App Store, but this app itself is not.
Edit:
Since writing this answer I've got some more project, much more complex than the one linked above. MBCalendarKit is the one I'm most proud of. Feel free to tear it up.
I think Apple makes good code sample codes.
three20
http://three20.info/
Put together by facebook.
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Closed 11 years ago.
well lot of forums and even this site is full of questions where people don't use any framework(whetever language they use) and they are stuck on code for common tasks like logins,database accesses,etc while frameworks provide code that works correctly for these routine tasks. Then why do people still go without frameworks? i want to know this because i am trying to build something of substantial scale so i was deciding if i really need a framework or a homegrown solution would be better? a homegrown solution can be a great learning experience but is there something more to it?
Some reasons:
Some tasks are so small that it's easier to do them without a framework, which:
would have to be bundled;
would take up an order of magnitude more space than the app itself;
would impose a lot of requirements both for the app and the hosting platform;
would provide unnecessary overhead because of a lot of features which are unused in the particular app;
Wanting to find out about how things work;
Homework assignments;
Not being able to use the framework for some reason (constrained space, not enough permissions, etc.)
Not knowing about these frameworks;
Reducing dependencies on external libraries;
Legacy reasons (the app is old, it was started before any serious frameworks were out);
People go without framework for several different reasons, in my opinion the choice of developing in-house functionality is not always a bad choice.
Frameworks often don't implement all functionalities required but often add extra functionalities that will never be used making the code base unecessary "bloated".
Implementing a framework often requires a steep learning curve and often it is easier to implement certain functionality in house.
However often a framework can be the best choice but developers jump into coding without doing enough research beforehand.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I am trying to decide between:
OpenFeint - http://www.openfeint.com/developers
Agon - http://developer.agon-online.com
ScoreLoop - http://corporate.scoreloop.com/features
All of the websites look clean. I don't know how many users they have but ScoreLoop has some recognizable games using the service.
Have you tried any of these platforms? Which is best?
Open Feint has some of the most well known apps as cross-promotions. Open Feint has a nice Objective-C API, matching Cocoa Touch.
Agonn has not as many apps for cross promotion, but are growing fast. Agon uses a C based API.
I Have no personal experience of ScoreLoop. But I understand that it allows much better UI customization than the other, making it easier to make the leader boards an integrated part of your game.
I just started experimenting with ScoreLoop, and so far I really like it. Integrating it into my cocos2d based game was pretty straightforward (just following the Getting Started document). It looks like there's a lot of room for UI customization, but I haven't really had a chance to play with this yet.
As far as I understand it, one of the differences between ScoreLoop and similar services is that in ScoreLoop, challenges are a central concept. So if your game can use challenges (mine will), this might be a good choice. It doesn't support chat, though. If you want more social networking features, OpenFeint might be worth a look.
I haven't personally tried any of these but Cocos2d also has a high-score framework built in.
I have good experience with OpenFeint. The developers were responsive to all my questions and helped me work around a few limitations.
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Closed 11 years ago.
What is the difference between custom building a CMS website and an open source CMS?
If you build the CMS yourself you have the great opportunity of going through all the problems and bugs that have already been encountered and fixed by the people the build open source CMS before. ;-)
Seriously, in my opinion, building your own CMS only makes sense if there is no open source CMS that you can customize to fit your needs. I think that you will have less trouble (and it will take less time) customizing some existing CMS.
Depends on what you need, how much time you have and how much coding experience you have. For example you could go and write your CMS, add only the functionality you need and keep it rather simple. But you'll have to debug it, take care of many issues like character encoding, security and you'll have to write even simple functionalities like an internal search engine. If you use something like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal (just to mention the most popular ones), you'll have very well tested environments that have been patched for many security issues. You'll find hundreds of extensions like photo galleries, search engines, multiple language support. The drawback is that if you want to add something particular you have to spend time learning their API... but probably that would require less that coding something on your own... or may not. It's all about the complexity of what you need. You should try taking a look at one CMS API, I suggest a popular one so that you'll find plenty of examples on Google, then try to figure out how difficult it can be to learn and finally make your decision.