Tapworthy: Designing Great Iphone Apps

So you've got an idea for an iPhone app — along with everyone else on the planet. Set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dollop of personality. Tapworthy takes you from concept to polished interface design with plain-spoken principles and a rich collection of visual examples for designing exceptional interfaces for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Witty, down-to-earth, and irreverent, this guide is for everyone involved in the app design process: designers, programmers, managers, and marketers. At every stage, you'll find a gallery of app screenshots to illustrate best practices and inspire you with innovative designs.

• Get practical advice for sharpening your app's features
• Build an effortless user experience
• Learn how to use iPhone controls correctly
• Create your own personality-packed visuals
• View the work of the best app developers through case studies
• Follow the evolution of app designs from early sketches to finished product

This book's common-sense principles will equip you to ask the right questions throughout the design process to make aesthetic, technical, and usability decisions that will make your app a pleasure to use.

So you've got an idea for an iPhone app — along with everyone else on the planet. Set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dose of personality. This accessible, well-written guide shows you how to design exceptional user experiences for the iPhone and iPod Touch through practical principles and a rich collection of visual examples.

Whether you're a designer, programmer, manager, or marketer, Tapworthy teaches you to "think iPhone" and helps you ask the right questions — and get the right answers — throughout the design process. You'll explore how considerations of design, psychology, culture, ergonomics, and usability combine to create a tapworthy app. Along the way, you'll get behind-the-scenes insights from the designers of apps like Facebook, USA Today, Twitterrific, and many others.

• Develop your ideas from initial concept to finished design
• Build an effortless user experience that rewards every tap
• Explore the secrets of designing for touch
• Discover how and why people really use iPhone apps
• Learn to use iPhone controls the Apple way
• Create your own personality-packed visuals

Josh Clark is a writer, designer, and developer who helps creative people get clear of technical hassle to share their ideas with the world. When he's not writing about clever design and humane software, he's building it. Josh is the creator of Big Medium, friendly software that actually makes it fun to manage a Web site and he's the author of iWork '09: The Missing Manual. In a previous life, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at Boston's WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. Now Josh makes words and spins code at his hypertext laboratory globalmoxie.com in Paris, France, where he lives with his wife Ellen.