Creating a Simple iPhone Application

Creating an iPhone app is considered as a time consuming task. The main reason for this is the different stages in the development process of a mobile application.  Creating an iPhone application may need the knowledge of programming, designing (implementation) and testing as well.  We take an iPhone app example for this particular article. iPhone applications became popular as many developers started working on the platform with the evolution of the smartphone industry.

Before creating an iPhone app you need to have the basic idea about what you are going to create and how it will be implemented. For this you need to have a prototype of the application created from iPhone mockup software. Actual implementation of the application may seem hard. But creating the initial prototype is easy when you can illustrate it with a wire-frame or mockups. We’re taking a sample application idea for the sake of this article and I will be describing how you can take it forward to make a prototype from an iPhone mockup.

The App Idea

We’re taking this simple example of an alarm clock to set the alarm to get up every day. With this clock you will be able to set a time to wake up and control the desired time along the week.

Functions

Main function of the alarm is to set a specific time and to trigger the alarm when that time is reached. Other than that, below functions are included in the app.

1.      User specific alarms

2.      Customize the time along the week

3.      Selecting alarm tones.

When creating the prototype for this application first you will need a login. This alarm application can be used by desired number of people. Since, you need to have a registration form as well. The first phase of the iPhone prototype is the welcome screen with the login. An illustration of step one is given in the fig 1.1 below.

For this screen I have used two buttons and two input text fields.

Thereafter you need to illustrate the screen after logging in. This screen usually shows the name of the person that is using the application with a nice greeting. This screen also shows information user needs to operate the application including controls to assign an alarm and change setting. You can see this screen in the figure 2.0 below.

As you can see the user is logged in and the last alarm time is shown at the top right side of the screen. The 3 main icons on the screen represent the corresponding functions in the app.

Now you can create the next screen which is the setup screen. The user should be able to setup the alarm at a desired time. The alarm should also be able to set on all 7 days of the week. This is a very interesting screen and the most important one as well. In this screen I have used a foreign object to illustrate seven days of the week. You need to be able to navigate to the specific screens within the app. A back button will be included to this page to return to the previous page.  See figure 3.0 for alarm setup screen.

Another important function would be to setup the alarm sound. In this screen you need a list to pick a sound to set the alarm. By using the web picker you can do this as it was done for the alarm picker. Figure 4 illustrates the sound picker.

The final screen is the history screen to show the history of alarms that a user had used. For this I’m going to use a list object in the prototyping tool to illustrate. I have also put a button to clear up the history in the list as well. You can see the final screen in figure 6 below.

It is not that hard to create a mockup of the prototype when you have a clear idea of what you are doing. You can develop your app idea into a usable prototype using an iphone mockup tool. Your mockup can be understood by anyone to develop a working prototype.