Programming iOS 4

Chapter 40. Epilogue

You may go, for you’re at liberty.

—W. S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance

This book must come to an end, but your exploration of iOS will go on and on. There’s much more to know and to explore. A single book that described completely, or even introduced, every aspect of iOS programming would be immense — many times the size of this one. Inevitably, severe limits have had to be set. Having read this book, you are now in a position to investigate many further areas of iOS that this book hasn’t explored in any depth. Some of these areas have been mentioned in individual chapters; here are a few others:

OpenGL

An open source C library for drawing, including 3D drawing, that takes full advantage of graphics hardware. This is often the most efficient way to draw, especially when animation is involved. iOS incorporates a simplified version of OpenGL called OpenGL ES. See the OpenGL Programming Guide for iOS. Also, some forms of animated display (chiefly, but not exclusively, those using OpenGL) will benefit from CADisplayLink, a timer object that calls a method repeatedly based on the refresh rate of the screen’s physical display.

Accelerate framework

Certain computation-intensive processes will benefit from the vector-based Accelerate framework, added in iOS 4. See the vDSP Programming Guide.

Game Kit

The Game Kit framework covers three areas that can enhance your user’s game experience: Wireless or Bluetooth communication directly between devices (peer-to-peer); ...