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

Make the Most of Any B&N NOOK–Including NOOK Tablet, NOOK Color, or NOOK Simple Touch!

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Book Description

Software test automation has moved beyond a luxury to become a necessity. Applications and systems have grown ever larger and more complex, and manual testing simply cannot keep up. As technology changes, and more organizations move into agile development, testing must adapt—and quickly. Test automation is essential, but poor automation is wasteful—how do you know where your efforts will take you?

Authors Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster wrote the field’s seminal text, Software Test Automation, which has guided many organizations toward success. Now, in Experiences of Test Automation, they reveal test automation at work in a wide spectrum of organizations and projects, from complex government systems to medical devices, SAP business process development to Android mobile apps and cloud migrations. This book addresses both management and technical issues, describing failures and successes, brilliant ideas and disastrous decisions and, above all, offers specific lessons you can use.

• Test automation in agile development
• How management support can make or break successful automation
• The importance of a good testware architecture and abstraction levels
• Measuring benefits and Return on Investment (ROI)
• Management issues, including skills, planning, scope, and expectations
• Model-Based Testing (MBT), monkey testing, and exploratory test automation 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 »