iPhone® Application Development For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Part II

Working with the Storyboard and User Interface

Killer iPhone apps start with the user experience. This goes beyond a pretty interface and includes how people use your app to accomplish want they want.

Of course, the boys and girls at Apple really understand that and have included the Interface Builder editor — which is much more than your run-of-the-mill program for building graphical user interfaces — in Xcode to enable you to build a real interface. In this part, you also discover the storyboard, which is the icing on the Interface Builder cake. The storyboard lets you lay out the entire application flow and save you a lot of coding, to boot.

In this part, you find out how to use Xcode to lay out the first screen of your application. You add background images and controls that will be new user’s first experience with your application.

Of course, you need code to make your application do something beyond just sitting there and looking nice. The iOS frameworks provide what you need to make your application an application. You use frameworks to display your windows and views on the screen, navigate, add animation and sound and mostly anything else you might need. Next, before you can actually build that sucker, you look under the hood at how iPhone applications work — what goes on behind the screen that ends up with a user seeing something in a window and interacting ...