Advanced iOS Interface Design?

I've done a bit of iPhone development (3 apps in the appstore currently) but the interface has been pretty plain. I've used the stock components for the most part (UITableViewController, etc.) with a little bit of customization, but for the most part everything looks pretty generic. I'd like to get started developing apps with a richer user interface, but haven't found any good resources to get me started.

What resources have you all come across that outline how to create more advanced iOS int开发者_开发技巧erfaces (both iPhone and iPad)? Books? Blog entries? Just looking at the apps I have installed right now, some of the interfaces I've been very impressed with are the ESPN Score Center, XFINITY TV, Facebook, etc.

What about 3rd party interface component libraries? Are there any you recommend that provide more advanced interface components than those in the stock iOS library?

I'd love to take a look at any resources that you recommend for getting started.

I love Ray Wenderlich's tutorials. He's got one on Core Graphics which allows you to draw your own Table Views with headers, buttons, and bezier-curved footers!

Here's a little secret that often gets overlooked: a lot of the cool UI elements you see are stock Apple elements that have been customised to the brink of no return.

The main reason for this is Apple have put a lot of time and effort into making components that just plain work. A UIScrollView, for example, has had many more combined hours of testing than any app you write could hope to achieve.

The trick is to know exactly how to customise elements. A UITabBar is a good example: I've seen several apps that use their own custom tab bars. The problem is, often they don't handle edge cases particularly well. You might have issues if somebody tries to hit two items at the same time (I've actually seen an app that used their own implementation of a tab-bar crash if you pressed two items at the same time).

But if you use Apple's UITabBarController and either subclass, categorise, or otherwise overload it to get the customisation you want, you get a lot of the low-level event handling stuff for free.

You would be amazed with what you can do with a UITableViewController, and you get things like view recycling for free (some of the apps I've worked on have things like independent cell resizing, customised animation of cells, horizontal implementations of a tableview, etc).

Not a particularly useful answer, I grant you, but the point I want to get across here is once you've designed your kick-ass UI step back and consider what can be achieved with the existing toolset before rolling your own. You'll thank me when you come to bug fixing!

I also like Three20. Until now I didn't use it in my projects, but I played with it. And there's some really cool stuff in it. ;-) I think that's one way to extend your standard User Interfaces.

Another really cool part is designing your own elements. I like this really. Because you then have in your App something nobody else has. :-D

I've started looking into using Opacity for Mac, it's a pretty neat desktop application where you can generate your own graphical elements (buttons, switches, icons, etc) and then automatically generate the CocoaTouch / Quartz2D classes and headers to drop in your app ... Some elements work best when they're natively drawn on the device, rather than stored/loaded as pngs, or whatever. Moreover, you get @2x Retina display support for free. While not an interface dress-up framework, the fact that it generates Quartz2D code for you makes this a real contender for anyone who's remotely graphically creative but short on complex 2D programming skills.

Speaking of beautiful interfaces, if you're looking for inspiration or actual graphical elements to put in your interface, I frequently get some great ideas at 365psd ... they actually provide the Photoshop documents to reproduce some eye dropping UI goods, for FREE. Some places may just give you a PNG, but this does little good if you want to scale it (@2x or iPad) or customize it to fit your needs. It's like open source for graphical UI design.