HeadFirst iPhone Development: Chapter 2

Posted on January 11, 2010 by Wan Chi Lau in Development Environment, iOS Programming, iPhone, Natural User Interface, RainyDayEngineering, UI Prototyping // 0 Comments

We had to take a few days off because of a cold. We were down for the count for about five days. Today was the first day we felt well enough to crack open the Head First book.

Chapter Two was about "app patterns." We first heard about "patterns" from a book called "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software." The idea is that there are "things" which repeat over and over. There is no need to "invent" everything from scratch. Most iPhone applications will fall into some category. Knowing which category will help one decide what elements to take from the "toolkit" and which to code by hand.

There is a distinctive interface to all Apple software and the iPhone apps are no exception. Apple has a Human Interface Guide (HIG) which they expect developers to follow. This ensures consistant behavior of standard controls and user experiences from application to applications. Either drink the Cool-Aid or get thee to another platform. We happily imbibed.