iPhone® Application Development All-In-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Designing Your Application

In This Chapter

• Asking "Where's the beef?" in your application

• Making sure your users don't hate you

• Designing for perpetuity

• Providing lots of functionality

While DeepThoughts is a fun little app, and debugging is well, debugging, it's time to move on to the more interesting stuff. In this chapter, I'll start you down the path to developing a more complex application. While I won't be dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's (I'll leave the memory management details for you to explore on your own, for example) I will be showing you how to use many of the technologies you need to know as you develop your own applications.

Defining the Problems

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the RoadTrip project was no exception. My daughter was about to leave on a 7,000 mile road trip around the U.S,, and, in anticipation of the Great Adventure, every square inch of surface area in her apartment was covered with maps, campground information, places to see, a schedule of who to visit where, and on and on.

"Please, Dad," she said, "you're so smart. Can't you figure out a way so that I can do all this on my iPhone." Being a sucker for the "Please, Dad" and the "you're so smart" combination, I started to give it some thought, and eventually the RoadTrip application idea was brought kicking and screaming into the world.

The purpose of the application would be to present information that's relevant to a) where you are, or b) where you plan to be. By concentrating ...