Professional iPhone™ and iPod® touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari™

Chapter 3. Implementing the Interface

The previous chapter surveyed the UI standards and guidelines that you need to keep in mind as you design an application that works well on iPhone and iPod touch. With these design principles in hand, you are ready to apply them as you develop and program your application.

In order to demonstrate how to implement an iPhone interface, I will walk you through a case study application I am calling iRealtor. The concept of iRealtor is to provide a mobile house-hunter application for potential buyers. The current pattern for Internet-based house hunting is to search MLS listings online, print out individual listing addresses, get directions, and then travel to these houses. However, with iRealtor, all of those tasks can be done on the road with an iPhone-based application. The design goals of iRealtor are to provide a way for users to:

• Browse and search the MLS listings of a local realtor.

• Get a map of an individual listing directly from its listing page.

• Access information about the realtor and easily contact the realtor using iPhone phone or mail services.

• Browse other helpful tools and tips.

As you look at these overall objectives, an edge-to-edge navigation design looks like an obvious choice given the task-based nature of the application. Joe Hewitt's iUI (code.google.com/p/iui/) will serve as the underlying framework for the user interface. iUI is designed to retrieve and format HTML fragments and automatically handle many application events, such ...