Most of these "insanely great looking" apps are done Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. It's really easy (even before iOS5) to pull it off. iOS5 of course makes it super easy with the use of UIAppearance.
Cocoa Touch has everything built in to pull this off. I'm working on an app right where the ui is "completely custom". I say it like that because I'm using all the default Cocoa Touch stuff, just "skinned" as you will.
Just because it's looks good doesn't mean it's an HTML5/JS app.
Get out of the mindset that Objective-C and Cocoa can't do this kind of stuff. With ObjC you can do pretty much anything your mind can imagine (within the hardware limits of the iPhone or iPad).
If you're curious about how to implement the stuff look up UIAppearance, and google stuff like "how to implement a custom UITabBar"
That seems like a pretty solid response from someone who uses the native core mostly; thanks for that.
I understand that we certainly can pull it off with the native core (ObjC/cTouch) but always wondered if all those "insanely great looking" apps took the pain of skinning all the controls, coming up with their own look and feel of everything the core provides and extending them, or is there a framework (library or something) that makes it easy to pull these off with a fairly decent effort?...that was my question.
Yes most took the pain of skinning the application to get the look and feel they wanted. The pain was soothed with iOS5's UIAppearance in a big way though. UIAppearance makes it easy because you can set the look of a component throughout the entire application. For example I only have to skin the UINavigationBar once, and the UITabBar once. Then all navBars and tabBars I use have the same look and feel.
Comments
Most of these "insanely great looking" apps are done Objective-C and Cocoa Touch. It's really easy (even before iOS5) to pull it off. iOS5 of course makes it super easy with the use of UIAppearance.
Cocoa Touch has everything built in to pull this off. I'm working on an app right where the ui is "completely custom". I say it like that because I'm using all the default Cocoa Touch stuff, just "skinned" as you will.
Just because it's looks good doesn't mean it's an HTML5/JS app.
Get out of the mindset that Objective-C and Cocoa can't do this kind of stuff. With ObjC you can do pretty much anything your mind can imagine (within the hardware limits of the iPhone or iPad).
If you're curious about how to implement the stuff look up UIAppearance, and google stuff like "how to implement a custom UITabBar"
That seems like a pretty solid response from someone who uses the native core mostly; thanks for that.
I understand that we certainly can pull it off with the native core (ObjC/cTouch) but always wondered if all those "insanely great looking" apps took the pain of skinning all the controls, coming up with their own look and feel of everything the core provides and extending them, or is there a framework (library or something) that makes it easy to pull these off with a fairly decent effort?...that was my question.
Yes most took the pain of skinning the application to get the look and feel they wanted. The pain was soothed with iOS5's UIAppearance in a big way though. UIAppearance makes it easy because you can set the look of a component throughout the entire application. For example I only have to skin the UINavigationBar once, and the UITabBar once. Then all navBars and tabBars I use have the same look and feel.