iPhone™ Application Development for Dummies®

Chapter 14. Designing Your Application

In This Chapter

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

• Making sure your users don't hate you

• Avoiding painting yourself into corners

• Providing lots of functionality with a small footprint

ReturnMeTo, the star of Part III, is a useful little application and a great way to learn about iPhone software development. Apple considers it a utility application — like the Weather application, but with a single view.

Utility applications can provide real value to the user and are also fun and easy to write — not a bad combination. The good news is that by now, if you have been following along with me in the book, you understand enough about the framework, its architecture, components, and control flow to figure out how to build a nice little utility application on your own.

Not that you're all set right now to do everything you'd like — far from it. The way the Weather application flips the view, for example, may seem a total mystery. But Apple goes out of its way to provide samples for many of the neater tricks and features out there, all in hopes of demystifying how they work. In Chapter 18, I'll give you an annotated tour of the samples. With the ReturnMeTo application under your belt, it'll be a lot easier to understand and use all the resources Apple provides to help you develop iPhone applications.

What Apple doesn't show you (and where there's a real opportunity to develop a killer app) is how to design and develop more complex applications. Now, ...