Wow! eBook – Blog

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 »

Book Description

Step-by-step instructions with callouts to Windows Phone 7 photos so that you can see exactly what to do

Help when you run into Windows Phone 7 problems or limitations

Tips and Notes to help you get the most from your Windows Phone 7 device

Full-color, step-by-step tasks walk you through getting and keeping your Windows Phone 7 working just the way you want. Learn how to:

• Get started fast! Covers Windows Phone 7.5 Mango release.
• Master Windows Phone 7’s elegant interface and powerful shortcuts
• Quickly set up ringtones, voicemail, Airplane Mode, wallpaper, accessibility, and more
• Connect to the Internet, Wi-Fi networks, and Bluetooth devices
• Get and send messages easily via Outlook, Windows Live, and Google accounts
• Find almost anything with content search, contact search, and Bing web search
• Work seamlessly with OneNote, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and SharePoint documents
• Use Zune and Marketplace to import media content and download applications
• Discover your phone’s built-in apps, and easily pin them to your Start screen
• Store content in the cloud, with Microsoft SkyDrive
• Reach your destination faster with Maps, GPS, and turn-by-turn voice directions
• Use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn social networking via the People Hub Download Now »

Book Description

In just 24 sessions of one hour or less, you’ll learn how to build high performance games for Windows Phone 7 with Microsoft’s free XNA 4.0 toolset. Using this book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach, you’ll master all the skills you need to design, develop, test, and publish highly playable games for any WP7 device. You’ll learn how to integrate game logic, touch screen user input, bitmaps, animations, audio, physics effects, GPS location services, and more. Each lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, culminating in the construction of a complete game—and giving you a rock-solid foundation for real-world success!

Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common Windows Phone 7 game development tasks.

Quizzes and Exercises at the end of each chapter help you test your knowledge.

By the Way notes present interesting information related to the discussion.

Did You Know? tips offer advice or show you easier ways to perform tasks.

Watch Out! cautions alert you to possible problems and give you advice on how to avoid them.

Learn how to… Download Now »

Book Description

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 handsets have injected a new vibrancy into the smartphone marketplace and provided bold new opportunities for the Microsoft development community.

Take advantage of these opportunities with Beginning Windows Phone App Development, written specifically to help you learn the skills you’ll need to develop rich, functional apps for the Windows Phone 7 platform. Authors Henry Lee and Eugene Chuvyrov cover the very latest developments in the field—including the extended APIs offered in the new Mango platform update—so you’ll have timely, accurate information at your fingertips.

Beginning Windows Phone App Development starts with the basics, walking you through the process of downloading and setting up the right development tools, including Visual Studio,Expression Blend, Silverlight SDK, and Windows Phone SDK. It then takes you step-by-step though the development process as you build and deploy a working application, complete with a sophisticated user interface. Finally, you’ll receive step-by-step instructions on packaging and selling your applications through the Windows Phone Marketplace.

What you’ll learn

• How to create effective networked applications
• How to leverage your phone’s GPS capabilities from within your application
• How to interact with the phone’s built-in functionalities Download Now »

Book Description

From weather apps which give you a forecast based on your current location to fitness apps which track your speed and distance travelled. From Google Maps to Foursquare. Increasing mobility and social networking has made location awareness an integral aspect of modern iPhone applications.

This book will teach you everything you need to know about building iPhone location aware apps, from simple Google maps to complex region monitoring and augmented reality. Build five real world location aware apps and get a taste of HTML5-based mobile app development.

The book begins by explaining behind-the-scenes working of location-based systems, including GPS. Explore in depth iOS Core Location and the MapKit Framework, using examples depicting each capability of the respective frameworks. Having learnt about location and maps, you will build five location-based apps using the APIs and SDKs publicly available. The book has everything for a beginner as well as advanced users, with chapters devoted to advanced topics such as push notifications, geo fencing and augmented reality.

What you will learn from this book

• Learn everything about Location Based Services from concept to implementation in the real world.
• Build your own Foursquare type app using the Foursquare API.
• Discover Core Location and different techniques of location detection. Download Now »

Book Description

Would you like to create money making games for iOS? If so,  Unity iOS Game Development Beginners Guideis for you. It will guide you through the entire creative process of designing a game through to making money from it.

This book will teach you the secrets of building and monetizing games for the iOS platform using the latest version of Unity. The book is linear and progressive so every chapter builds upon the knowledge of the last. You will learn Unity and the iOS basics necessary to get started. You will design a game for the iOS. You will build that game feature by feature. Finally you will publish your game and add the features that will enable your game to generate revenue.

You have never built anything using Unity or iOS so we will begin with the basics. We will then move onto the basic features of a game: scenes, AI, characters, accelerometer, and input methods. Once you have mastered this we will begin the creation of our game – a 3rd person perspective dungeon crawler game inspired by the arcade game called Gauntlet. You will bring AAA quality to the game by adding co-op multiplayer so that your friends can join in and participate in the game. You will also add occlusion culling and beastmap lighting. Next you will integrate the game with some 3rd party services for advertisements, micro transactions, and in app purchasing. You will also integrate with Game Center. Finally you will publish your game for the entire world to see.

What you will learn from this book

• Create an AppStore account. Download Now »