My name is Dominik Hauser. After I finished my PhD in physics, I worked at a university as a tutor and as such was looking for an app about physics and math formulas. It was the beginning of the App Store, and the only apps I could find didn’t fit my needs. So I decided to build my own. Two years later I switched careers to become a full-time iOS developer, and I haven’t looked back since then.
What I like most about iOS development is when someone finds a cool way to use the available resources to create something nobody has seen before. One of these moments was the invention of the pull-to-refresh control by Loren Brichter in the early days of iOS. The users loved this kind of user interaction, and Apple added it to iOS some years later.
For me iOS still has lots of corners where discoveries can be made. You need to keep your eyes and your mind open, and you need to experiment and explore. Let your mind wander sometimes and try ideas that seem silly.
One day while riding my bike home after work, I had just such an idea: a pull-to-refresh control that’s also a break-out game played by scrolling the table view. A few months later I implemented it and posted it to GitHub, a site to share open source projects. I think (and hope) no one ever put that into a real app because it really was silly, but nevertheless, it received more than 2,000 stars.
The projects in this book are meant to be a starting point for your own experiments. I hope while working through the chapters you get ideas for how to create something special and unique from the example apps. Explore, try ideas even if they seem strange or too big, and, most importantly, have fun!