Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Developers, build mobile Android apps using Android 4

The fast-growing popularity of Android smartphones and tablets creates a huge opportunities for developers. If you’re an experienced developer, you can start creating robust mobile Android apps right away with this professional guide to Android 4 application development. Written by one of Google’s lead Android developer advocates, this practical book walks you through a series of hands-on projects that illustrate the features of the Android SDK. That includes all the new APIs introduced in Android 3 and 4, including building for tablets, using the Action Bar, Wi-Fi Direct, NFC Beam, and more.

• Shows experienced developers how to create mobile applications for Android smartphones and tablets
• Revised and expanded to cover all the Android SDK releases including Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), including all updated APIs, and the latest changes to the Android platform.
• Explains new and enhanced features such as drag and drop, fragments, the action bar, enhanced multitouch support, new environmental sensor support, major improvements to the animation framework, and a range of new communications techniques including NFC and Wi-Fi direct.
• Provides practical guidance on publishing and marketing your applications, best practices for user experience, and more

This book helps you learn to master the design, lifecycle, and UI of an Android app through practical exercises, which you can then use as a basis for developing your own Android apps. Download Now »

Book Description

When you’re under pressure to produce a well designed, easy-to-navigate mobile app, there’s no time to reinvent the wheel. This concise book provides a handy reference to 70 mobile app design patterns, illustrated by more than 400 screenshots from current iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian apps.

User experience professional Theresa Neil (Designing Web Interfaces) walks you through design patterns in 10 separate categories, including anti-patterns. Whether you’re designing a simple iPhone application or one that’s meant to work for every popular mobile OS on the market, these patterns provide solutions to common design challenges. This print edition is in full color.

Pattern categories include:

• Navigation: get patterns for primary and secondary navigation
• Forms: break the industry-wide habits of bad form design
• Tables and lists: display only the most important information
• Search, sort, and filter: make these functions easy to use
• Tools: create the illusion of direct interaction
• Charts: learn best practices for basic chart design
• Invitations: invite users to get started and discover features
• Controls and feedback: help users perform actions, and provide them with timely feedback Download Now »

Book Description

It’s true: you can build native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone with C# and the .NET Framework—with help from MonoTouch and Mono for Android. This hands-on guide shows you how to reuse one codebase across all three platforms by combining the business logic layer of your C# app with separate, fully native UIs. It’s an ideal marriage of platform-specific development and the “write once, run everywhere” philosophy.

By building a series of simple applications, you’ll experience the advantages of using .NET in mobile development and learn how to write complete apps that access the unique features of today’s three most important mobile platforms.

• Learn the building blocks for building applications on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone
• Discover how the Mono tools interact with iOS and Android
• Use several techniques and patterns for maximizing non-UI code reuse
• Determine how much functionality can go into the shared business logic layer
• Connect to external resources with .NET’s rich networking stack
• Read and write data using each platform’s filesystem and local database
• Create apps to explore the platforms’ location and mapping capabilities

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Surveying the Landscape Download Now »

Book Description

In this book, bestselling author and iOS development guru Erica Sadun brings together all the information you need to quickly start building successful iOS apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Sadun has thoroughly revised this book to focus on powerful new iOS 5 features, the latest version of Objective-C, and the Xcode 4 development tools.

The iOS 5 Developer’s Cookbook, Third Edition is packed with ready-made code solutions for the iOS 5 development challenges you’re most likely to face, eliminating trial-and-error and helping you build reliable apps from the very beginning. Sadun teaches each new concept and technique through robust code that is easy to reuse and extend. This isn’t just cut-and-paste: Using her examples, Sadun fully explains both the “how” and “why” of effective iOS 5 development.

Sadun’s tested recipes address virtually every major area of iOS development, from user interface design to view controllers, gestures and touch, to networking and security. Every chapter groups related tasks together, so you can jump straight to your solution, without having to identify the right class or framework first. Coverage includes:

• Mastering the iOS 5 SDK, Objective-C essentials, and the iOS development lifecycle
• Designing and customizing interfaces with Interface Builder and Objective-C
• Organizing apps with view controllers, views, and animations featuring the latest Page View controllers and custom containers
• Making the most of touch and gestures—including custom gesture recognizers Download Now »

Book Description

Build the Next Great Android Game!

Learning Android Game Programming is your hands-on, start-to-finish guide to creating winning games for today’s rapidly growing Android mobile device marketplace. If you have even basic Android development experience, Rick Rogers will help you build on your knowledge to quickly create low-budget 2D mobile games that sell.

The book starts with an up-to-the-minute overview of today’s Android mobile games marketplace, reviews each leading genre, and teaches you the foundational concepts of game development. You’ll design a simple game, then master every step of game development with AndEngine—the powerful, open source, free game-development engine. Every chapter teaches with sample code you can actually use, including many examples drawn from the published game, Virgins Versus Vampires (V3).

With this book you’ll learn how to

• Use free Android tools for creating code, artwork, and sound
• Implement the “game loop” that is at the heart of Android games
• Bring your game to life with scene transitions and entity modifiers
• Make the most of bitmap and vector graphics, sprites, and animation
• Integrate user input via touch, multitouch, keyboard, voice recognition, accelerometer, location, and compass
• Build infinite virtual worlds with tile maps Download Now »

Book Description

Essential Windows Phone 7.5is the definitive guide to creating powerful, visually compelling mobile applications that take full advantage of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 platform. Nine-time Microsoft MVP Shawn Wildermuth draws on his extensive experience teaching Silverlight and Windows Phone development, helping you to get started fast and master techniques that lead to truly outstanding apps.

After introducing the latest version of Windows Phone, Shawn Wildermuth dives directly into the essentials, emphasizing best-practice examples and illustrating with code. You’ll build a complete application from start to finish, then build on your skills with increasingly sophisticated techniques.

From planning and design through application delivery, Shawn Wildermuth guides you through the entire mobile development lifecycle, showing how to make the most of Windows Phone 7.5’s most important new capabilities. Whether you’re a .NET or Silverlight developer going mobile, or an experienced mobile developer moving to Windows Phone, Essential Windows Phone 7.5 delivers all the skills you’ll need.

Coverage includes:

• Leveraging Microsoft’s breakthrough Metro design language
• Using phone features such as email, calling, search, Web browsing, and the camera
• Designing the look and feel of your user interface with XAML Download Now »