What do you use to draw iPhone ui and write iPhone requirements specification?
I use balsamiq mockups to draw up the screens, then I write a up a page for each screen explaining behaviors
There are a number of stencils available out there for OmniGraffle and for Photoshop. I've used Omnigraffle before to create images and drop them into a Word or Pages document.
Interface Builder generally to mock up a UI, and I typically write out spec informally in notes. However, if I were submitting these to other people (i.e., a contractor or subcontractor) I'd probably be using Pages or something similar to take my informal notes, and present something formal.
Related
What would be the easiest way to graph a line graph on a iOS app? I am building a iOS app that needs a line graph I don't need anything complex just something that will graph a int.
I have seen core graph but not sure if thats the way to go.
You're probably thinking of core-plot, which would be a fine solution if you want something that has a lot of features and is ready out of the box.
If you want something more minimal, you could create your own line graph UIView subclass very easily and make it do exactly what you want. Building a general-purpose graph library is a lot of work because there are so many ways that people like to vary their graphs. If you know exactly what you want and don't need something more flexible, rolling your own can be a quick and effective solution.
If you do decide to roll your own, Matt Gallagher's Cocoa With Love blog has a number of very good graphics entries to get you started.
Apple's Accelerometer sample app (on their iOS Developer Center web site) includes some example code for a simple line graph.
Nuclios http://www.infragistics.com/products/ios/ is a pre-built library that has a bunch of graphing styles. It's not free but I don't think the license fee is outrageous either ~$250
You could take a look at BEMSimpleLineGraph.
It's modeled after UITableView and offers a wide range of features.
We're beginning development work on a newsreader app which pulls stories from a RESTful API in XML format. Each story contains:
Html formatted text with links to external web pages (around 1000 words per story)
1 inline advert banner (640x100)
1-10 inline images (640x320 each)
The newsreader will load 10 stories at a time when opened. It needs to be robust and performant (smooth scrolling etc).
We're considering whether to display the stories using the native UIWebView or Three20 open source library but am not sure which is the best choice. UIWebView seems to have more flexible text formatting but Three20 sounds more robust and less prone to memory leaks.
I'd appreciate any advice anyone might have from their experiences.
Thanks!
Well, the answer is: Oh, it depends.
The three20 framework offers a lot of things that you would have to do on your own - if you need these offers. If you like URL-based navigation, this might be a plus for going with three20. You mentioned flexible text formatting, which you can achieve with both approaches. three20 allows you to subclass their classes, apply styles, ...
My advice: take a deeper look in the documentation, ask yourself, if you need more than one feature that three20 offers and decide then which way to go. As with all third party frameworks, you'll have to put some effort in making things work.
I'm a totally blind developer who would like to do iPhone development. From what I've heard most of Xcode is accessible with voiceover, the screen reader built into the Mac. My understanding is that the interface builder is mostly to completely inaccessible for blind users. Assuming I can not use interface builder is there an alternative way of creating simple to moderately complex user interfaces? I really don't want to spend $600 on a Mac to find out that it will be nothing more then a paper weight for me.
You don't necessarily need Interface Builder. In fact, some friends who work at Apple say they mostly code the interface. If you can code so far, i'm sure you can code the interface as well.
I'm also a blind developer. Over Christmas I purchased a second hand Mac, and spent 2 weeks on exactly this.
It was certainly possible to develop a complete app without Interface Builder. I used tricks like setting the text in a label, sizing the label, and then programatically calculating the absolute position for the next control by adding some space between controls.
Probably like yourself, I've always wanted to create things myself as it's more fun, and you can experiment more quickly. There's also a certain amount of pride - if you can do it yourself, who needs to hire help.
But what I realised is that my UI was pretty functional, but not at all esthetically pleasing. Most iPhone apps don't just have UI controls on a plain background - there's often a lot of colorful icons and pretty backgrounds involved.
The deal braker for me, personally, was reading the Apple guidelines and seeing that you need icons which conform to some pretty stringent guidelines, in at least two different sizes. The application icon is important as this is much of how people choose whether to download something.
So, if I have to hire a designer to make my icons, I may as well get them to lay out the UI.
Ideally, Interface Builder would be accessible enough to drag controls onto a view (not possible today), and bind them to code. We could then develop an application with no regard for how the controls were layed out, hire a designer, let them do whatever they want with the xib and our code would continue working.
Just my thoughts based on personal experience - there are many resources for learning to create UIs without IB if that's the route you choose.
Interface builder is provided as one way to design user interfaces, but it does not do anything that can't also be done in code. It's a way of building object archives containing (mostly) user interface objects, which can be un-archived and used at run time. But the same objects and properties could be set up in Objective-C and would work just as well.
Apple usually does a better job with accessibility. If Interface Builder is not accessible, I suggest filing a bug at http://bugreport.apple.com/ about it.
I've done a bit of iPhone development (3 apps in the appstore currently) but the interface has been pretty plain. I've used the stock components for the most part (UITableViewController, etc.) with a little bit of customization, but for the most part everything looks pretty generic. I'd like to get started developing apps with a richer user interface, but haven't found any good resources to get me started.
What resources have you all come across that outline how to create more advanced iOS interfaces (both iPhone and iPad)? Books? Blog entries? Just looking at the apps I have installed right now, some of the interfaces I've been very impressed with are the ESPN Score Center, XFINITY TV, Facebook, etc.
What about 3rd party interface component libraries? Are there any you recommend that provide more advanced interface components than those in the stock iOS library?
I'd love to take a look at any resources that you recommend for getting started.
I love Ray Wenderlich's tutorials. He's got one on Core Graphics which allows you to draw your own Table Views with headers, buttons, and bezier-curved footers!
Here's a little secret that often gets overlooked: a lot of the cool UI elements you see are stock Apple elements that have been customised to the brink of no return.
The main reason for this is Apple have put a lot of time and effort into making components that just plain work. A UIScrollView, for example, has had many more combined hours of testing than any app you write could hope to achieve.
The trick is to know exactly how to customise elements. A UITabBar is a good example: I've seen several apps that use their own custom tab bars. The problem is, often they don't handle edge cases particularly well. You might have issues if somebody tries to hit two items at the same time (I've actually seen an app that used their own implementation of a tab-bar crash if you pressed two items at the same time).
But if you use Apple's UITabBarController and either subclass, categorise, or otherwise overload it to get the customisation you want, you get a lot of the low-level event handling stuff for free.
You would be amazed with what you can do with a UITableViewController, and you get things like view recycling for free (some of the apps I've worked on have things like independent cell resizing, customised animation of cells, horizontal implementations of a tableview, etc).
Not a particularly useful answer, I grant you, but the point I want to get across here is once you've designed your kick-ass UI step back and consider what can be achieved with the existing toolset before rolling your own. You'll thank me when you come to bug fixing!
I also like Three20. Until now I didn't use it in my projects, but I played with it. And there's some really cool stuff in it. ;-) I think that's one way to extend your standard User Interfaces.
Another really cool part is designing your own elements. I like this really. Because you then have in your App something nobody else has. :-D
I've started looking into using Opacity for Mac, it's a pretty neat desktop application where you can generate your own graphical elements (buttons, switches, icons, etc) and then automatically generate the CocoaTouch / Quartz2D classes and headers to drop in your app ... Some elements work best when they're natively drawn on the device, rather than stored/loaded as pngs, or whatever. Moreover, you get #2x Retina display support for free. While not an interface dress-up framework, the fact that it generates Quartz2D code for you makes this a real contender for anyone who's remotely graphically creative but short on complex 2D programming skills.
Speaking of beautiful interfaces, if you're looking for inspiration or actual graphical elements to put in your interface, I frequently get some great ideas at 365psd ... they actually provide the Photoshop documents to reproduce some eye dropping UI goods, for FREE. Some places may just give you a PNG, but this does little good if you want to scale it (#2x or iPad) or customize it to fit your needs. It's like open source for graphical UI design.
How do you design a UI like Facebook?
Is it hard to implement a custom skin into a iphone app? How is it done?
Do I need to follow apple's guideline? What if I don't want to?
How do you design a UI like Facebook?
Facebook's iPhone app appears to be built around using UITableView in various guises. It looks like it adheres to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
Is it hard to implement a custom skin
into a iphone app? How is it done?
Skins are just graphic elements that are designed to have their image components swapped out. They are not difficult to implement.
Do I need to follow apple's guideline?
What if I dont want to?
Apple will not penalize you for a non-standard interface. The only interface restrictions are (1) some issues of obscene content and (2) you can't create the illusion that the device itself is broken, has crashed or otherwise failed.
A bit of advice. Don't use non-standard interfaces.
Good interfaces are almost by definition standardized so that users don't have to think about them. Novel interfaces slow users down even if they have no problems otherwise. Just try switching rapidly between Mac, Windows and Linux sometimes. None of the interfaces has major problems per se but having to stop and think how to do something in each particular interface is a pain. You can create the same problem by using a good but non-standard interface within an app.
That is assuming of course that you can actually create a good interface. There are far, far more ways to make bad interfaces than there are to make good ones. Most interfaces fail even those designed by interface gods. The standardized interfaces are the result of tens of thousands of hours of testing and years of experience. You're unlikely to whip out something really new and useful your first time out.
If you try something novel I suggest you mock it up first and then test let people test it without giving them any instruction. You'd be surprised how complex it can get. We used to just make photoshop mockups and then ask test users what they thought each element did or which element they would choose to accomplish a particular task. We were surprised at how poorly our (the developers) perception of the interface overlapped with the perception of the users.
In sum, a novel interface is more likely to hurt your app than help it.
With regard to how to build an app like Facebook, check out Three20. In particular, the TTLauncherView is the class that implements the Springboard-like grid of icons.
3- You don't need to follow the AHIG. But be careful if you don't, because it's very easy to go wrong doing so. Users like to not have to learn anything new. They know the typical Apple software UI, so if you use it, users will know how to use your app as soon as they buy it. If you don't use it, it is important to make sure that the UI is exceedingly easy and intuitive, and looks good to an iPhone user's eyes (and fingers).