Apple's iPhone SDK/Cocoa Touch framework provides some very elegant UI widgets out of the box. It's a beautiful thing when you design your app's interface, and it comes great-looking already. However, us programmers tend to be lacking skills in interactive design and awesome usability. This book comes in for the rescue.



Authors of this book have been to the trenches, and they wrote their own experiences and their thought processes here in their chapters. It's amazing how a little app has so much design decisions involved.

Chapter 1 - How and why design apps that have similar look and feel like the default built-in Apple apps, and some tips on whether to tap or not, and usability testing.

Chapter 2 - The author takes on the Google news reader, and improves the navigation and re-structured his app design to be more efficient.

Chapter 3 - The author talks about the differences between web and native apps, and some best practices and tricks

Chapter 4 - The author shows how the design evolved along with design decisions and adjustments

Chapter 5 - This is my favorite chapter. The author discuss in depth of how to design UI interactions with iPhone's unique size and features. The discussion on rotations is especially thought-provoking!

Chapter 6 - This chapter shows that even designing a very simple and basic app, it still takes consideration on usability and appropriate user interactions.

Chapter 7 - This chapter is great in showing you many ways to tune your app details into great enhancements to your apps. Little details you would otherwise take for granted or ignored.

Chapter 8 - As a programmer, I'm happy to see some codes behind the app. This chapter shows you how to build a simple but interesting game, with the focus of how to receive user interactions with minimal efforts. Codes are provided so it's a great read!

Chapter 9 - The author talks about different font styles and typefaces.

Chapter 10 - The author shows us many tips and tricks during the entire app development life cycle.



Overall, this book shows us how iPhone apps are developed from a different angle. Many great tips/tricks and real-world experiences. It's a great read w/ about 240 pages. Any iPhone programmer would learn a thing or two from this book. My only complain is that some chapters are too short. Hopefully 2nd edition of this book can include additional iPhone app designers/developers :)