Question

well… I have searched for a while on topics of coding given GUI elements by designer in photoshop format. But I have a really hard time getting it together. Just for an example. When I would like to make an app with only a simple LCD-Display with a timer, counting down, how would I start there….. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware of doing the code behind the scenes to make the timer count etc.

But what about setting up a nice looking gui with glossy display effect? What is a “correct way” to implement such a gui? Taking a Photoshop file showing a glossy display and setting a UILabel on that? or coding the gloss effect programmatically?

This is just one example… hm… I do not find good ressources for getting a start on such a topic. I would be really gladful if you could give me a helping hand for a start.

Answer 1

In the typical app development cycle, you would have the graphics people delivering graphics to the programming people, in the form of PNG files.

However, it is very well possible to render all kinds of things on the fly on the device. The blue shade on the tab bar icons in any app using UITabBarController is a clear example: the programmer puts in a PNG with just the alpha channel, and the system renders the blue shading.

Using Quartz Core (look for CGContext in the documentation) you can draw lines and text, and apply all kinds of transformations, gradients, clipping paths, etc. Using this you can create your own styled subclasses of UIView and such.

The PNG approach is generally the easier way.