Woo! I've been asked to write an iPhone app for my Dad's company.

It'll be a fairly small stand alone app but will include a hell of a lot of interconnectivity (Facebook style with permissions etc...)

Can't wait to get something together. I have a brief I now need to start putting a spec and a design together.

Most of the stuff I've done in the past has been hobby type stuff so it's been a case of start writing and see what comes to me. I want to do this properly though so I'm doing a ground up design approach.

I may need some tips or opinions along the way.

Hope you can offer some help

We've been asked by a rather large international bank to come up with some ideas and designs for an iPhone app - we won't be programming it, but will be involved in the design, functionality and content of the app.

Now I have to admit, I haven't got a clue where to start or what size to work to when designing something like this. I'm aware there are various UI guidelines that Apple expect you to adhere to, but don't know what they are. Being primarily a print designer, with a bit of web work under my belt, the whole app design is new to me.

The only thing vaguely iPhone-related I've done previously was to adapt the x404 logo for a home page button for this site, so I'm a bit out of my comfort zone on this one! I'm not really interested in becoming an iOS developer, as the coding side doesn't really interest me, but if needs be I suppose I can sign up if that gives me access to these UI guidelines or developer tools. Does this cost money?

Do you have any tips or links that give me info on the size, specs and requirements? At this stage, we're just doing a selection of screens as flat visuals to show the client, along with some styles for the actual app icon/button. Presumably, with the new iPhone 4's higher resolution screen, as well as the iPad's even larger screen area, you have to do multiple sizes, or do they scale up and down as required?

Any pointers, gratefully received.

You can find the UI documentation here and can access it for free (You may need to create an account, but that's free)

I believe the iPhone apps on the iPad will scale up automagically, but a separate iPad app would look nicer and you could let it offer more functionality due to the added screen space.

EDIT: The previous link was for the iPhone/iPod Touch, this link is the UI guidelines for the iPad

Just the 150-odd pages then.
That's a bit of bedtime reading for me!
Thanks, that's all useful stuff.

I've tried wading through before, but always got fed up. You may find it a bit more technical than you need to know. You may find a book such as this gives you an insight to what might be possible while giving you examples of how interfaces should look. They probably won't explicitly tell you how to lay them out, but I'd doubt they will stray from Apple's HCI rules themselves...

Cheers, I see that book is for iPhone OS 3, how different is that from iOS 4?

AFAIK there are a few more APIs for iOS4 that allow for background tasks and state save for app switching etc...

And if that book is for iOS 3 the resolutions will be wrong-the iPhone 4 has a higher resolution screen, remember.

It hasn't made a difference to my apps though.

I wrote them all for iOS3 with iOS3 resolutions and when run in iOS4 simulator it still works perfectly.

I'm not sure but I think you may have to "turn on" iOS4 resolution coordinates if you want them. Either way though, all the controls are in high def now.

I'm sure that Apple will deal with all the UI elements, but any graphics Steve74 might create will need to be in a different resolution to that stated in the book to get best results on iOS 4.

Well I got stuck at one point and found it difficult to carry on (especially when it usually meant working til after midnight ::checks watch:: see).

But it's finally coming together into a form that can be recognised as an app!

It isn't connecting to any online database yet, I'm purely doing it from an XML file on my computer and it isn't saving any results.

Just trying to get the functionality working first!

It's really quite cool though now!

I've taken next week off work to work on the app and I'll be over at my Dad's house. Hopefully will be able to talk to his programmer and get some connectivity going also!

The most useful thing ever is all the stuff I have done in the past. Little experimental apps that never went anywhere or the proof of concept I did for work etc...

The stuff I learnt in them and the code that I have access to from the learning is invaluable as I'm able to pull little bits together to get it all working