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Best iOS development books and references

Pietro Zuco — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:45:08 +0000

After reading many books about iOS development, these are the ones that I found most useful and enlightening. Apple documentation is very good as well, but, unfortunately, they don’t have an easy progressive path. It’s more like a modular, self contained reference repository.
Learning how to program for iOS is a huge topic that not only requires understanding of a concrete programming language and a framework, it also requires the understanding of the philosophy behind Apple products. Coding of iOS devices also opens the door to learn how to program for MacOS X as well. If you are a Windows developer, this is a great opportunity to learn how to code on a powerful UNIX platform.
I strongly recommend to read these books or at least, try to use them as a point of reference to understand what you need to learn to create a strong base that will help you, coding any application you want, and also saving a lot of time while being more productive and taking advantage of this technology.

Programming iOS 4 is, by all means, the best book I’ve ever found about iPhone/iPod/iPad development. It covers almost everything. For more esoteric stuff you have to search your way in Apple documentation, but this book will give you a clear understanding about the whole picture. It’s a dense book, with a lot of content. If you are looking for a quick guide, this is not the book for you. Anyway, if you plan to do something serious quick guides or for dummies series are not for you either.

For a more practical approach, Beginning iPhone 4 Development is like a quick reference and a learning guide at the same time. It’s really practical and has ready to use code recipes for most common patterns, such as: navigation controllers, pickers, table views and so on. This is not the book that will give you a strong understanding. For that you have Programming iOS 4, which is much better, in that sense. Anyway, I recommend Beginning iPhone 4 Development, I used it a lot and I still use it when I forget how to use common controls.

You have to read Programming in Objective-C period! The content of this book or an equivalent is essential. You can go ahead taking a dummies series and build an View Based app or a Table View app, but if you want to do something different, you will have no idea about what’s going on without Objective-C.

Learn Objective-C on the Mac covers the same content as Programming in Objective-C, but from a more practical approach. I recommend both. In fact they complement each other. Anyway, Programming in Objective-C gives a more deep theoretical explanation of the language. Believe me, you’ll need it!

If you only plan to code for iOS, you won’t need Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. This is the best book to learn Cocoa I’ve ever read. It gives a little approach to iPhone development as well, but its main purpose is MacOS X platform. The App Store is available also for Mac, so it’s not a bad idea to learn how to code for Mac as well. Anyway, you need a Mac to develop for the iOS, so I think it’s a good idea to master these skills as well.

To be honest, Head First iPhone and iPad Development was a very big deception for me. The Head First Java and Head First Design Patterns are amazing books. But don’t let the reputation of those books influence your judgment if you plan to buy Head First iPhone and iPad Development. The book is too practical, so practical, that it’s like a funny recipe book that you can use to build apps similar to those explained… but nothing more. Table Views are a topic of tremendous importance. It’s a pattern that you can use to build countless applications but, for some reason, the topic is not deeply covered. Just to mention an example, the book spends several chapters talking about a Table View based reference application (a drink mixer) but it didn’t cover how to create hierarchical tables in a proper way. I expected more from this book, based on the great reputation that Head First series has. I found several erratas as well.

To end with this post, here you have these good online references. The one that always you have to give precedence is Apple official documentation, so I suggest you to read as much Apple docs as you can. Specially HIG (iOS Human Interface Guidelines). If you don’t follow what the HIG says, don’t complain later if your app is rejected in the App Store.

Apple documentation staring point.

iPhone Dev SDK Forum

iPhone SDK Articles One of the best code examples and references out there.

Stackoverflow well, you know it! :-)

To conclude. If you plan to develop and sell apps for iOS, you will sooner or later join the Apple Development program. The forums in the portal are a huge, amazing source of information. It’s an amazingly active community. I’m sure you can find an answer for your problem in those forums.

Let me know if you have more suggestions, links and books you would like to mention.
I would love to hear about good book titles for developing games by the way :)

Golden rules of photography

Pietro Zuco — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:51:11 +0000

I don’t like to talk about “rules”. I prefer to call them just advices. In fact following rules in photography means to understand nothing about it!
Anyway everybody calls them “rules” so let’s keep the traditional name.
These rules are based on the The Golden Ratio. It’s a special proportion that exists everywhere in nature. For some reason, it’s related to us as living beings in this universe and it affects the way we interact with things.

Rule of Thirds

This rule is more about composition. It has a strong relationship about how humans perceive reality and how humans read visual information.
You just have to divide the frame in three parts horizontally and vertically. So we will have three zones and 4 intersection points.

Try to place the objects of interest in the intersection lines and avoid to center the object in the middle of the image.

Of course it depends, for example, in this picture I cropped it to put the main subject (it was me…) in the middle of the frame. Why? Because the main subject of this picture is not related to the sharpness of the image but to the whole situation that shows a man fighting the wind with his bicycle.

One more scenario where the Rule of Thirds is applicable is in landscapes, where the horizon line plays an important role in the composition. Just try to avoid the horizon line to divide the image in two perfect parts. Just place the horizon line in the upper third or the bottom third, depending on which part of the image you want to give more emphasis. For example, if it is the sky, put the horizon line in the first third from the bottom.

Of course there are exceptions, for example in this picture I preferred to leave the horizon line just in the middle because in this picture the important part is just the horizon!

Diagonal rule

In this case we use the zone indicated by the following image. The important part of the image will reside in the zone delimited by those lines.

For example these pictures can illustrate these rules:

Golden Spiral

One more application of the golden number is an spiral. The one I draw in the picture is not perfect, but it renders the idea.
It’s not necessary that the object takes the whole picture. The important thing is that the composition makes the eye move to the center of what you want to show.

For example in this picture, your eyes will go immediately to the faucet. Okay, it’s the biggest object in the composition, but if I would like to take the faucet in the middle of the frame, the eyes wouldn’t point directly to the faucet as in this case:

There are more rules, these are the basic ones and the possibilities to play with proportions and discover new properties are infinite… So let’s try and play :)

Lightroom Tips #1 – Selective Desaturation

Pietro Zuco — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:13:36 +0000

Let’s see how I did to create this effect on this picture of Mio Igarashi. The picture was originally took with a Nikon D200 and RAW file format, lens: Nikkor 50mm/F1.4.

This is the final result, let’s see how to do it

In develop mode, select the “show clipping” tool by click in the little arrow or just press “j”:

In this way we can only see the 100% dark, the black parts of the picture:

Then, let’s select the “adjustment brush”:

This is a “swiss knife” tool. Let’s set just what we need to modify and apply it to the interested zones. In this case we want to make her background really dark, so let’s reduce the “exposure” and “brightness”:

This is how the bush is been shown on the picture. The “+” sign indicates that we will apply the bush in that zone and from there we just move around to the places we want to modify:

The blue part indicates the real dark zones. As far as we apply the adjustment brush with those settings, we can control which parts are really dark seeing at the blue color:

Once we complete this process we should have a perfect dark background that gives a sensation of deep-less to the picture. If we have no point of reference to understand where the background is, every people produces his/her own sense of deep behind the subject which could, in certain cases, be more suggestive than a normal background.

Now let’s desaturate to create a black and white zone. Again we choose the adjustment brush but this time with different settings. First make sure that you don’t alter the exposure and brightness setting those parameters to zero. Then desaturate completely as shown here:

Now apply just to the interested zones only :)

Advice:

If you plan to do an effect like this, first think about how you can help yourself to reduce the edit and post processing time. In this pictures the helping parts are: She has beautiful dark hair. As far the black and white part is the human body, her black hair helped me in the zones where the hair is over her dress. Just imagine to desaturate only the hair part over a colorful background… It would take hours and the final result could be a little bit fake.
Then, her dress has a black zone surrounding her breaths. That helped me not to worry about the precision to apply the desaturation brush.
A dark background also helped in this process. Remember that it’s not only a matter of time is also the fack that we want to make it as natural as possible. Everybody knows that that’s not real but if feels natural.

Check the final result

Do you like this kind of effect?
What about leave some parts of the face in black and white? for example a black and white face and red lips?