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iOS recipes : tips and tricks for awesome iPhone and iPad apps

by Matt Drance, Paul Warren

Take your iPhone and iPad apps to the next level. You've seen cool features and tricks in other apps, but haven't had the time to really look into how they're done. We've got the answers for you. This book walks you through clean, reusable solutions to a wide variety of problems

Accession 9781934356746 ISBN 9781934356746 Publisher Pragmatic Bookshelf

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position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:11
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binding_type: Hard Back
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spine_text: iOS Recipes Drance • Warren Pragmatic Bookshelf

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iOS recipes : tips and tricks for awesome iPhone and iPad apps

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Topics and Themes

1. **UI Design & Custom Controls**
The book gives substantial attention to building polished, visually distinctive interfaces — covering custom splash screens, toggle buttons, rounded views, sliders, progress indicators, and attributed-string labels. The emphasis is on moving beyond default UI widgets to craft interfaces that feel refined and intentional.

The underlying principle is that great apps don't just work — they look and feel distinctively crafted, and that quality is achieved through deliberate, reusable UI construction.

Connect to books about: UI design patterns, human interface guidelines, UX design for mobile, visual design principles.

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2. **Animation & Graphics Programming**
A significant thread of the book focuses on animation and graphical systems — animating custom notification views, creating endless scrolling album art walls, and building 2D animation effects. This reflects co-author Paul Warren's background in graphical systems and computer graphics.

The book treats animation not as decoration but as a core communication tool — motion conveys state, feedback, and personality in a mobile app.

Connect to books about: computer graphics, 2D/3D animation, Core Animation, game development for mobile.

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3. **Reusability & Software Design Patterns**
Throughout the book, the "recipe" format enforces a discipline of writing clean, modular, drop-in solutions. Splash screens, web views, alert views, and gesture recognizers are all framed as self-contained components that can be transplanted across projects.

The deeper theme is that good software architecture is about composability — building pieces that are independently useful and easy to integrate.

Connect to books about: design patterns, software architecture, object-oriented programming, clean code.

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4. **Cocoa Touch & Objective-C Programming**
The book is grounded in the Cocoa Touch framework and Objective-C, Apple's native language and UI toolkit at the time of publication. It explores the framework's idioms — delegation, blocks, UIKit view hierarchies, and table views — as the vocabulary through which iOS apps are built.

Understanding this framework deeply, rather than skimming its surface, is presented as the key to writing professional-grade apps.

Connect to books about: Objective-C, Swift, Cocoa/Cocoa Touch framework, Apple platform development.

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5. **Gesture & Touch Interaction**
The book dedicates attention to custom gesture recognizers, reflecting how touch is the primary input paradigm on iOS. Designing and programming touch interactions goes beyond tapping buttons — it involves interpreting swipes, pinches, and custom motions as meaningful user intent.

This theme connects the book to broader questions about how humans interact with computers through physical, embodied gestures rather than keyboards and mice.

Connect to books about: human-computer interaction, tangible interfaces, multitouch design, input device theory.

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6. **Mobile App Development as a Craft & Profession**
Both authors are independent consultants and developers, and the book carries a strong practitioner's sensibility — it is written by people who build apps for clients and take pride in the quality of their output. The "recipes" metaphor itself implies a craft tradition: tested techniques passed from experienced practitioners to newcomers.

The book implicitly frames iOS development as a skilled trade with standards, not just a technical exercise.

Connect to books about: software craftsmanship, the pragmatic programmer philosophy, developer productivity, indie software business.

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7. **Platform Ecosystems & the Apple Developer Experience**
The book is inseparable from the Apple ecosystem — the App Store era, Apple's developer tools, and the cultural moment when the iPhone and iPad were rapidly reshaping computing. Matt Drance's eight-year career at Apple gives the book an insider's perspective on how the platform was designed to be developed for.

This situates the book within a larger story about how platform owners shape what developers can build and how they build it.

Connect to books about: platform economics, the history of Apple, the app economy, software entrepreneurship.

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8. **Problem-Solution Thinking in Engineering**
The book's structure — each recipe posing a concrete problem and delivering a concrete solution — reflects a core engineering mindset: decompose complexity into discrete, solvable problems. Table views, web views, and gesture recognizers each get their own isolated treatment before being composed into larger wholes.

This mirrors how experienced engineers think: not in monolithic systems, but in well-bounded problems with testable, transferable answers.

Connect to books about: computational thinking, algorithmic problem-solving, engineering methodology, developer best practices.

iOS recipes : tips and tricks for awesome iPhone and iPad apps

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