Book Image

iPhone User Interface Cookbook

By : Cameron Banga
Book Image

iPhone User Interface Cookbook

By: Cameron Banga

Overview of this book

The incredible growth rates for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad have pushed consumers to a new “App” economy, with developers racing to the platform. Mobile touch-centric interfaces vary greatly from traditional computing platforms, and programmers as well as designers must learn to adapt to the new form-factor.The iPhone User Interface Cookbook offers a complete breakdown of standard interface design on the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. You will learn the tools behind the trade, how to properly utilize standard interface elements, and custom UI tricks that will help your work stand out on the App Store.The book is designed to be a complete overview of interface design on all iOS platforms, offering insight and an inside look into app design. A variety of topics are covered, starting with an overview of tools for the app interface designer, touching upon popular interface components such as the Tab Bar, and offering suggestions for complex game interfaces. Whether you’re new to the platform or a seasoned developer with numerous applications in the App Store, this book strives to teach everyone simple and easy to implement tips for iOS interface design. Regardless of skill level, the iPhone User Interface Cookbook offers a detailed breakdown of all things interface design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
iPhone User Interface Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
PacktLib.PacktPub.com
Preface
The Importance of Direct Manipulation
If you need a stylus, you blew it

Creating a custom Tab Bar for our iPhone application


While we'll often want to implement a standard Tab Bar, there may be an occasional situation for which we will want to create a customized Tab Bar that offers up a bit of a different look.

This will require that we create the new bar entirely in Photoshop, and then use these buttons to transition through different views. As we're creating something custom, we don't have many rules to follow. However, we should still create a Tab Bar that is somewhat recognizable to the user.

In this recipe, we'll discuss a technique for creating a custom Tab Bar for our iPhone application.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll need a copy of Adobe Photoshop or another similar raster image editing application. It will also be useful to have the source file, titled TabBar.PSD, downloaded from the Packt website.

How to do it...

We will need to go about creating a very structured and organized set of image files in order to have an effective custom Tab Bar. Let...