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Posts Tagged ‘oreilly’

Best iPad Apps – Peter Meyers

December 13th, 2010

Best iPad Apps – The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders is a book by Peter Meyers, who was formerly an editor for O’Reilly Media and now writes about and designs digital books.
The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders is a series of books by O’Reilly which has covered iPhone Apps and Android Apps.

This book is targetted only to the iPad applications.

Summary
This book has over 200 pages with nice graphics, designed just like Apple’s range of products.
The applications being recommended are categorize as:

  • At Work – Applications use for documents editing and calculations
  • At Leisure – eBooks, reading, news, music, and radio related applications
  • Creative Corner – A fun collection of digital tools like band jamming, drawings, and photos editing
  • At Play – Best Games out there, Scrabble for iPad, Cut the Rope, Angry Birds, Need For Speed, Fruit Ninja
  • At Home – Online shopping, Cooking, Educational apps
  • Out and About – Travelling, restaurant guides, and language translation
  • For Your Health – Health related apps, such as application for health references and general fitness

My Review
With the sheer number of applications in the Apple App Store, it would take a long time for one to pick the best app for the task of accomplishing something.
This might be the main problem for one who has just picked up the iPad.
With that in mind, this book is a god-send guide for first time iPad users who might not have the pleasure to purchase and try all the apps in a specific category and to pick up the best app.
However, users who have been using iPhone or the iPod Touch would probably have their own preference of applications.
The author has picked the ‘Best Apps’ with the purpose of selecting apps as elegant as the iPad itself and apps that are usable without much instructions. They should be intuitive for first time users.
That said, we all know that the content and applications published in the App Store is constantly changing, but this book might not.
So most of the apps are either official ones, such as Twitter app from Twitter.com or Scrabble for iPad. Then there are popular games such as Angry Birds and Cut The Rope.
It’s pretty safe to say for non-advanced iPad users, this book would be most beneficial, to have a quick start in using the iPad without wasting time trying apps or purchasing them one-by-one, as you have a review with very graphical description of the reviewed apps in this book.

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Mobile Design & Development – Brian Fling

December 1st, 2010

Mobile Design and Development by Brian Fling is a book about practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and mobile web applications.

Summary
This book is written in a conversational format, as the author covers the basic knowledge and history about Mobile, its ecosystems, how it turns out today, and what’s in store for the future.
This is a book that should be read by mobile developers or anyone interested into getting into mobile development, to get a better idea of the mobile application environment before taking the jump.

My Review
If you are not working in the mobile or telecommunications industry, the first few chapters would be beneficial even for mobile developers who are just starting out, to learn a bit about mobile history and to learn from it.

The author, Brian Fling, an established leader in the mobile development community, with over a decade of experience, shares his opinion and recommends techniques on how to develop a better mobile application or a mobile web application for your users.

There are now many variables in developing a mobile application, with factors such as the variations in mobile devices, manufacturers, browsers, screen size, as compared to just building a website or web application.

This book does not go deep technically, but it goes wide into introducing technologies and tools that you can use for your mobile project.

The most beneficial thing that you can gain from this book is the tips and pitfalls of mobile development. Gathering questions you should ask yourself before starting out with your next mobile project, you would most likely get a higher success rate than just diving right in with your idea.

Disclosure:
This Mobile Design & Development book review is made possible by my participation in O’Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Books, Internet, Review, Software, Technology , , ,