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!
WebsocketD
Gamamia
Treeo for iPhone
Treeo for iPhone