Mobile UI Patterns

Looking at some of the most popular apps in the App store you can learn a lot about successful mobile UI patterns.

Mari Sheibley, the lead designer at foursquare has an awesome website that catalogs common mobile UI patterns.

They are broken down into the following categories.

• Activity Feeds
• Check-in Screens
• Comment Detail
• Edu Walk Throughs
• Empty Data Sets
• Lists
• Notifications
• Settings
• Sign Up Flows
• Splash Screens
• User Profiles

see Mobile UI Patterns › Activity Feeds

Some Useful iOS Libraries

AppDev Magazine previously listed some useful iOS libraries. Below are the libraries listed and a couple of additional libraries that I have used.

• ASIHttpRequest- a HTTP Network request library
• ShareKit - a library for sharing items to different services. 
• Flurry - an analytics library and service
• GData Objective-C Client - iOS library for most of Google's Services.
• Facebook iOS SDK - Facebook API library
• RegexKitList - a regex library for iOS
• TouchJSON - a JSON library for iOS
• JSON Framework for Objective-C - a JSON library for iOS
• Core Plot - a 2D Graph plotting library for iOS.
• SDWebImage - a library for dealing with web images.
• Three20 - a general iOS library.
• MBProgressHUD - a progress indicator library
• Cocoa Controls - a website with lots of Cocoa controls.
• iPhone Open source libraries - a list of some open source libraries for iOS apps. (dated but useful)
• More open source libraries for iPhone development - another dated list of open source libraries for iOS development

A lot of the libraries in the above list are very useful, very current and widely used so there should be a lot of examples around on how to use them. I recommend the ASIHttpRequest, ShareKit, Flurry , GData Objective-C Client, Facebook iOS SDK, RegexKitList, TouchJSON, JSON Framework for Objective-C, Core Plot and SDWebImage because I have used them recently. The rest I haven't used recently so I cannot recommend them. You can also read 10 iOS Libraries to make your life easier. for more information about some of these libraries.

Xcode 4 is now available

Yesterday Xcode 4 was made available to developers. It is a significantly better Xcode with lots of new features and enhancements. I was able to open my Xcode projects, build and run them without any problems. You cannot install the release version on Lion, but there is a Lion release that you can use to build Lion apps.
Xcode now works like most other IDE's where there is a workspace and an integrated Designer tool. Yes, now Interface Builder can run inside of Xcode and the single window model works really well.

Some Notable Changes

• Single Window model
• Built-in Interface Builder
• LLVM Compiler
• Faster Debugger
• Version Editor and Management
• Improved Instruments.

The most significant change is the Single window model UI which consolidates many windows that are used for key development tasks. The new Xcode 4 work area called a workspace has several UI elements that make it easy to work on many different tasks while keeping your editor front and center. The new workspace window contains a Toolbar, a Tab bar, a Navigator area, a Utility area and a Debug area. You can have as many workspaces as you want (File>New>New Window creates a new workspace window). The workspace Navigator provides tools for viewing and managing your project. The Utility area is for inspectors and properties of selected artifacts. The UI changes combined with the improved compiler and faster debugging make it so much easier to develop software faster and more efficiently. There are many changes and the only way to understand them is to use them.