How to make my app more shiny? - iphone

im writing a litte iPhone App and are now searching for some styling Guides to make my App a little more shiny :)
For example add rounded rectangles to group Informations.
Style my cells, e.g. add a little border to my images I display in the cells.
Is there a guide / tutorial i can read?
What can be done with Interface Builder?
I found several guides for rounded rectangles, but what is the best way? Some recommend to do it with a button? Ohters with an ImageView and graphics?
Thanks for your links / hints!

Take a look at:
http://www.techjini.com/blog/2009/07/09/tools-for-iphone-ui-user-interface-design-mockups-wireframes-or-just-a-sketch/
It is a list of UI tools for iPhone.

http://cocoawithlove.com/2009/04/easy-custom-uitableview-drawing.html

Related

Where can I find some beautiful iPhone buttons?

Don't need image background, just good-looking color is enough.
Jeff LaMarche has some very iOS-looking and simple-to-use programmatic gradient buttons here.
You just need to add a .h and .m file to your project and you are good to go.
http://www.youthedesigner.com/2010/03/10/29-sexy-iphone-app-designs/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/10/09/iphone-app-design-trends/
These may not be of any use but check them out. There are some really well designed apps and u'll get a good idea of what colours work. Your question is slightly vague to provide an exact answer IMO.
You can get the RBB values of the colours using a number of tools.
Check this
Fun With UIButtons and Core Animation Layers

Iphone - grid of pictures using scroll view and ad UIImageViews to it

Can someone give me one source file working ?
Alternatively you can look at my AQGridView, which can display anything in a grid, using an API similar to that of UITableView.
You might want to take a look at Facebook's Three20, specifically their TTPhotoViewController class.
Update: Other options (possibly more modular and easier to integrate in your project):
https://github.com/mwaterfall/MWPhotoBrowser
https://github.com/kirbyt/KTPhotoBrowser
http://github.com/alanQuatermain/AQGridView (as suggested by Jim)

Nice looking UIButton

I'm trying to make a nice looking UIButton. I'm not exactly sure what I mean by that, but something nicer than just a plain white looking rounded corner button with blue font. I can't seem to find anything online, so can anyone help? I want to do it all by programming (no XIB) and I am not an artist so I can't draw any custom images or anything like that.
Back in May of last year, Jeff LaMarche (of iPhone dev shop Martian Craft and co-author of several iPhone development books) put out a suite called GradientButtons that makes it easy to implement pretty, shiny, colorful buttons. I've used it in several projects and it's quite nice.
Here is a tutorial on how to make a shhiny button all in code, no image needed!
Tutorial on gradients at CocoaWithLove
http://tapadoo.com/2010/tired-of-trying-to-create-nice-buttons-for-your-iphone-app-try-this/
I ran into the above link when I was searching for a similar resource. Did the job
The Apple UI guidelines would suggest I think that you use the standard button unless you have good reason not to.

iPhone Tile View

Does anyone know how to create an icon tile layout similar to that of the Application tile view, where I can hold down an icon and sort them. This is also similar to the home screen of the Facebook application.
Is there a special UI control that I can use, or will I have to create this manually? If so, how would I do that?
Help is very appreciated!
Joe Hewitt's Three20 library has a "Launcher View" that does exactly what you need.
http://github.com/joehewitt/three20
You could also use MyLauncher, if you prefer something other then the Three20 giant.
http://github.com/Jarada/myLauncher

iPhone: add badge to icons internal to my app

I am trying to add badges to the icons in my app. e.g. in the facebook app, in the home page the number of pending requests is shown on the requests icon.
Can someone provide any links/ideas on how to do this?
Thanks,
V
I know this article is a little bit old, but it helps me recently to make a little class to create custom badges. I thought it would be fair to make this class public for everyone. So here it is CustomBadge.
best regard
- Sascha
Lots of ways to do this. You can overlay a UILabel over the icon (which may be a UIView or UIImageView). YOu can put another view on top of the icon, and draw the text right into that view. Or make your icon view be a subclass of UIView, and when you get called to draw, you draw the icon and the number.
Plus, you may want to play with blend modes, shadow, masking, etc., in order to create something that is visually attractive.
I'd probably start with reading more about Quartz, if you haven't already. The rest is just how you wire it all up.
And some other links:
http://scientificninja.com/development/numeric-badges-on-the-iphone
http://th30z.netsons.org/2009/03/qt4-drawing-notification-badges/
alt text http://th30z.netsons.org/wp-content/uploads/qtdrawbadges.png
The Three20 project (its code is part of the Facebook app) has those badges.