I just finished reading the book. Here's a quick review...
I've been trying to get started with motion in iOS for a few weeks now and while the Developer Docs are complete, they take a lot of work to understand. This book was perfect, not just at explaining the APIs, but also how to think about structuring animations.
The book is short. I like that! I have a stack of iOS books that just ramble on for ages. I love how it gets to the point, and I feel in the space of two hours I've gone from being all confused about Core Animation, to feeling like I could achieve anything with it.
The format is perfect as well. Because it's an eBook, I was expecting a PDF or Kindle download or something. But it's distributed as HTML with excellent visual inline videos and animations. For this type of book it makes a huge difference. It also contains working XCode projects for the examples.
I've previously been using Framer.js to build animations (mostly because I've a stronger web background), but I was getting frustrated with how much extra work I needed to do to make it behave more like an iOS app. Besides, seeing as I have to build everything for iOS eventually anyway, this make life so much easier.
Another bit of kudos: Most tutorials I read have a tendency to over-abstract things, e.g. creating helpers, subclasses, loads of variables. I really like that this book didn't try to do any of this. Big long methods, few variables, and duplication. See even though in a real app you'd do this, I don't want to spend time reverse engineering abstractions in a book. The duplication actually made the code much easier to understand. Any competent developer can figure out their own abstractions and this book steers clear from forcing any particular style on you. Like it!
In summary: Awesome! If you have a grasp of the basics of iOS development and want to quickly build apps with natural looking animations - this is for you.
Thanks so much for the submission!
I've been working on this e-book for awhile, ever since I talked about iOS animation design & development at a local CocoaConf. As one of those odd designer-developer hybrids, I've never really seen a decent guide that combined animation design theory and live code examples, so I wanted to put one together and get it out there.
Check out some sample pages here: http://designthencode.com/motion... and let me know what you think!
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Hey, @flyosity, any plans to update the book based on Swift? I'm assuming it's strictly Obj-C since you said you've been working on it for a while and because Swift is finalized yet.
@McCroden Yup! I wanted to wait until iOS 8 was out before including any Swift examples. I actually have a bunch of additional examples I have already been working on in Swift that will be added to the book and provided to purchasers for free when they're done.
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Awesome! Bought! I always end up spending time finding inspiration for animations, so this should help.
Looking forward to digging into this one. Nowadays it is not enough to just have pretty colors and nice typography in an app. To really tug at the emotional strings you have to incorporate motion into things (not too much though, I get sick).
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