Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Core Animation gives you a lot of power and flexibility enabling you to enhance your
application's user interface with ease. There are, however, principles that you should
adhere to when you use Core Animation. In other words, just because you can animate
something doesn't mean you should. In this section, we talk about some overarching
principles that should guide your designs, and some suggestions of things you should
animate and things you should not.
Design Principles
Let's face it; developers are not designers. There are a few exceptions to that statement,
but for the majority, it is a rule. If you are a designer and you take offense to that state-
ment, be thankful for your abilities and forgive the sentiment. For the rest of us, however,
here are some helpful guidelines.
Keep It Simple
You've heard this one a thousand times, but you still ignore it. Most developers have to
be reminded on a regular basis that just because you can add all the controls you need to
a tiny little iPhone view to perform some task doesn't mean you should. When you think
of simplicity, don't think of what will make it simplest for you to implement but what
will make it simplest for your user to use. Keeping it simple is all about them—not you.
Don't Design, Borrow
You are likely in the nondesigner engineer camp as that label applies to the majority. You
should probably never, therefore, try to design a user interface from scratch. Instead, look
at the other applications out there that you admire most and borrow ideas from the ones
you like.
Pay a Graphic Artist
If you can afford good graphic artists, use them. I've seen some amazing designs that
scoped out the project so well that it left little room for feature creep. Getting a proper
design done is well worth the money. Build that cost into project estimates when free-
lancing and be prepared to pay that up front in your own applications that you intend
to sell.
By the Topic
When it comes to design, you should adhere to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
(HIG). This is especially true for iPhone development where designing things another way
will likely not only look bad but will also create usability issues for your end users. For
example, if you try to load your views on top of the current view by adding them as
subviews instead of using a navigation controller stack, your design will be difficult to
maintain from a coding standpoint, and the flow of the application will disorient your
end user. Instead, when you create new views, use view controllers and push and pop
them on and off of the navigation stack as specified in the iPhone HIG.
