Programming the iPhone User Experience

Chapter 7. Interaction Patterns and Controls

User interface design is an important part of application development because the UI is the face of an application. In fact, to most users, the interface is the application. Designers and developers spend a lot of time deciding how common interface elements should look and how interaction should occur. Designers of Cocoa or Cocoa Touch applications can take advantage of the Cocoa UI frameworks to rapidly prototype and adapt their interfaces. In addition to the frameworks, Apple provides developers with descriptions of interaction patterns for common problems in the Human Interface Guidelines.

Application Interaction Patterns

The View Controller Programming Guide for iPhone OS, included in the iPhone SDK documentation, explores several high-level design patterns for user interaction. Apple created semantics for describing the overall style of interaction for a given screen or set of screens in an application. Most applications will implement designs that can be described according to this vocabulary. Designers with an understanding of common patterns can use that knowledge to plan interfaces according to user needs.

Command Interfaces

A command interface presents users with a toolbar containing one or more buttons that represent executable actions. Command interfaces typically don’t use view controllers, and instead wire actions for buttons to other objects directly. You add a UIToolbar to your application to implement a command interface. ...