iOS Recipes: Tips and Tricks for Awesome iPhone and iPad Apps

Take your iPhone and iPad apps to the next level. You've seen cool features and tricks in other apps, but haven't had the time to really look into how they're done. We've got the answers for you. This book walks you through clean, reusable solutions to a wide variety of problems and patterns common to iOS development with Cocoa Touch and Objective-C. With these recipes in your arsenal, your next apps will be more polished and more maintainable than ever.

iOS Recipes begins with a tour of UIKit. Former Apple Evangelist Matt Drance and expert graphical-systems programmer Paul Warren show you how to write splash screens and embedded web browsers that are easily dropped into any project. You'll explore techniques for building complex table views without losing yourself in a sea of code, and see how to add some unique visual touches to any table--even the ones you've already built.

Next you'll explore Quartz and Core Animation, and you'll walk through a number of fills, transforms, and animations that will breathe life into any app or game. You'll also learn about gestures, transitions, and custom controls to take your user interactions to the next level.

You'll tackle networking with a few basic techniques to prevent unnecessary repetition in your codebases, and address some more complex problems like uploading large files to a web server. Finally, you'll see some simple disciplines and ideas that will make architecting, debugging, maintaining, and ultimately shipping your application easier every single time.

By the end of this book, you'll have expanded your iPhone and iPad development knowledge and be well on your way to building elegant solutions that are ready for whatever project you take on next.

Matt Drance founded Bookhouse Software, an iOS development and consulting company, after an eight-year career at Apple. He also trains new iOS developers for the Pragmatic Studio, and shares his thoughts on the industry at Apple Outsider (appleoutsider.com). When he isn't coding, writing, teaching, or being a stay-at-home dad, Matt snowboards and races cars in Northern California.

Paul Warren fell in love with computer graphics, programming on his Commodore 64, in the early 80s. After 20 years of corporate programming in assembler, he got back to his first love: working with fun graphical systems. Paul's iOS development and consulting company, Primitive Dog, specializes in 2D animation and custom controls. Two young daughters are enough to take up any time not spent making things flip, spin, and fly across his screen.