How to lay out an iPhone page

Question

I want to implement a description page in an iPhone app. It's the final page in a drill-down navigation structure and needs to include a title, description, icon, large image, date and some buttons the user can click on to activate another application. The information comes from an external source and the title, description and image all vary in size.

I've seen various ways of doing this, such as laying out each piece of information inside table cells, and creating views that look like web pages. I've come up against layout problems using a standard UIView and UILabel because of the variable size content.

Looking at other apps, I think Facebook and the App Store have the most attractive layouts and handle variable size content well. I'd like to know what the easiest way of getting an attractive layout is, and also which way will produce the best (as in best looking) results.

Answer 1

a few things first you are in luck because a lot of the facebook UI stuff is available in the three20 project

http://github.com/joehewitt/three20/tree/master

there are a lot of templates that you can use in there that might solve all your problems, however documentation is a bit light on, and it may take some reverse engineering.

Also, you didn't mention the UIscrollview this might help you get a layout with more information on the page.

To get the best looking apps unfortunately you need to have the eye for detail (or pay someone who does) read through apples Human interface guidelines, as they seem to know what they are doing.