iPhone Cool Projects

Product Description

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing field—developers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed! To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba’s Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer application—a topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think “collisions”). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can’t see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications.

Who is this book for?

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform

Summary of Contents

  1. Wolfgang Ante – Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game
  2. Mike Ash – Mike Ash’s Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
  3. Gary Bennett – Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
  4. Matthew “Canis” Rosenfeld – All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation
  5. Benjamin Jackson – Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
  6. Neil Mix – Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
  7. Steven Peterson – Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite

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July 31, 2010 Posted Under iphone

5 Responses to “iPhone Cool Projects”

  1. L. Palm says:
    July 31, 2010 at 5:40 am

    This book has expanded my horizons, showing me new ways to do things with the iPhone. Though it might be simplistic at first, it does a great job of conveying how to build real starting points for much better apps. The chapters are completely independent of each other, too, making it a great shelf reference!

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  2. aSingleParent says:
    July 31, 2010 at 7:15 am

    I just received this book and found the projects in this book extremely well done and relevant for iPhone developers. Every project in this book walks you through how to build iPhone applications from scratch using the iPhone 3.0 SDK, Interface Builder and Xcode. The book is in color so it is easy to read the projects examples along with all the Xcode settings and connections in Interface Builder.

    There are 7 chapters in the book, each chapter is done by a different author who specializes in that area. The authors spend time discussing all the issues with the design and development of their project. Unlike, so many other books like this that just show code, these authors spend time on the design and issues behind the project. The code is in the book and the full code is available from the publisher.

    The project chapters are on;

    1) a graphics puzzle game

    2) Peer-to-Peer networking

    3) Threading iPhone applications to increase app responsiveness

    4) Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation

    5) ****This is a great chapter/project******* Physics, Sprites and Animation with cocos2d-iPhone Framework

    6) Streaming Audio by the guy who wrote Pandora Radio

    7) Core Location, XML and SQLite

    The real world examples help you understand how to design and build iPhone applications and are especially helpful if you need a code snippet on a specific subject.

    I am really impressed with all the Apress books on iPhone Programming. Great authors, great examples and very well written.

    I’m sure you’ll find this book extremely helpful with your iPhone development.
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  3. Aaron says:
    July 31, 2010 at 9:59 am

    If you’re like me–learning Cocoa, know some C from way back in college, but otherwise a beginner–and you’ve gone through Mark and LaMarche’s Beginning iPhone Development, then this is your next book. Whereas the Beginning iPhone book goes into detail on the basics, this book shows how to stitch those basics together to solve more complex, more “real world” iPhone problems. Another value to beginners like me is that this book introduces various, generic programming concepts (such as threading, sockets programming, transferring audio data over a network, game timing, etc) that experienced programmers take for granted.

    For example, the first chapter does not only show you how to make a simple Quartz-based game, but also addresses issues such as synchronizing game timing with program timing. The second chapter (Peer to Peer Networking) combines the sockets API with Apple’s NSNetService networking framework. Before reading this, I didn’t know a socket from Shinola.

    What I like about this book is that each chapter is self contained, so you can jump around and read the stuff that is more immediately important to you.
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  4. Mr. Cairo says:
    July 31, 2010 at 10:59 am

    This book is a fantastic addition to anyones programming library. This is not a book for beginners as it covers some pretty complicated topics (look at the Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Apress if you want something a little more introductory). The topics include peer-to-peer networking, threading, multi-touch design, streaming audio and much more. This book can almost be considered an iPhone cookbook of sorts because of its wide variety of topics that are explored. For example, what I personally liked about this book is that it got into detail for certain things I was really interested in. There is a section of cocos2d programming (an open-source game development library of sorts). That was exactly what I needed to help me with a project I was working on. While that topic might seem a bit esoteric, the other topics are extremely practical. Good luck on finding any book that covers that library – only Wikis and forums so far. My only small gripe, and its more of just a timing issue, is that the book doesn’t cover any of the new OS 3.0 features – I’m sure that book is coming. If you are looking to add some cool ideas to your existing iPhone project, then this book is invaluable.
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  5. B. Lees says:
    July 31, 2010 at 1:10 pm

    I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it. I thought the chapter on Multithreading was especially good. That chapter alone was worth the cost of the book. It is amazing the stuff you can do on the iphone and the power once you understand how to develop for it.

    I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to get started with iPhone development or those who want to take their development to the next level.
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