TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

One thing is constant among most countries: public broadcast annoying everyone who owns a TV, extorting a tax for their usually very mediocre produce. But why is this so?

This book, published by the University of Cambridge, starts by looking at the media landscape of the past, breaking it into three distinct models.

Model number one is dubbed the “Polarized Pluralist Model”, and describes the media systems seen in mediterranean states such as Italy. Next up is the “Democratic Corporatist Model”, which is prevalent in most of continental Europe. Finally, the US “liberal” model is introduced.

After this introduction, the book moves on to differentiating the models in dimensions such as political influence, government subsidies and amount of unionization of staff. Even though these chapters do get a bit repetitive, they contain loads of interesting anecdotes which give extra food for thought.

A final chapter “rounds off” the tome by looking at what the future will hold for the various European media systems discussed.

From a text point of view, the book is – like most universitarian literature – too long for my taste. Nevertheless, it remains readable even for non-native speakers and contains quite a few interesting tables:

This book is ideal for all those who ever had to deal with public broadcasting and/or wonder how the news gets to their doorstep (and live in Canada, the USA or Western Europe) – the price of 30$ is ok.

P.S. The introduction is available in PDF form for free…

Before the PlayBook tablet by Research in Motion, ActionScript was a language mainly used by Flash designers for adding a bit of “brains” to their animations. Unfortunately, the BlackBerry tablet changed that – ActionScript now is interesting for classic programmers, too. Can O’Reilly’s classic satisfy the needs of this clientele?

The first chapters are best described as Programming for Dummies – not only do they show the syntax of AS, they also explain the concepts behind the idioms in painstaking detail. Seasoned IT vets will have issues not falling asleep here…

Part 2 focuses onh all things graphics: topics like pixel graphics, vector graphics and motion are explained in considerable detail. This treatise is very interesting, and contains many examples. However, it suffers from two weaknesses: first of all, it is focused on people programming games or graphic demos. The second and more significant weakness is the dependency on Flash CS – if you use Flash Builder, many of the examples can not be used.

Text, Sound and video get one chapter each. The same is valid for file IO and XML processing.

Our review is based on the second edition of the book. As usual for O’Reilly, it is well-written and contains loads of images. This time, the book is printed in color:

All in all, the book provides a great overview of the possibilities of ActionScript. Unfortunately, it is not perfectly suited for PlayBook developers – it does not explain the QNX controls or the Flash Builder IDE. However, developers who need to create a PlayBook app ASAP should invest the 32$ the book costs at Amazon’s – there is no better way to get up to speed with ActionScript quickly…

Neither technology nor management books are new – we have reviewed loads of both types on the Tamoggemon Content Network over the years. O’Reilly’s “the productive programmer” wants to change the genre – can it stack up?

Neal Ford chose to subdivide the book into two parts. Part number one looks at various interesting tools which make your work easier. Think about things like virtual desktops, multiple clipboards and so on – even though the small things may not make too much of a difference at first glance, the long-term effects of a minute a day have been documented here in the past.

Part two looks at things which programmers can do to make their lives simpler. This is the part of the tome which I didn’t really like – very little of the information is applicable for C and C++ – most of it is for dynamic languages like Ruby, with an occasional comment about Java.

As usual for O’Reilly, the book is easy to read and has a decently high paper quality.

In the end, the book contains a lot of small yet interesting hints – but unfortunately does not leave me 100% satisfied. If you expected a huge performance increase, forget it – on the other hand, the current price of about 35$ is not that steep…

I first saw Brian Fling’s book on Mobile Design and Development on a local connection. Mark A. M. Kramer, an Austrian maven of the mobile computer scene read and praised it – can the tome stack up in the largely empty area of mobile user interface design books?

Brian starts out by looking at the history of mobile and the mobile landscape as it is today. Long-term followers will not find much new stuff here, but it nevertheless makes for an interesting read.

He then moves on to “mobile strategy”. Topics include questions like “What is special about mobile”, the influence of “context” also is explained in some detail. Finally, various options for creating a mobile app are explained – some of them are somewhat obscure and definitely aren’t something you deal with every day.

The next part analyzes the design process for mobile applications. These chapters are what make the book really interesting – you are introduced to design, prototyping and user testing methods for touchscreen and non-touchscreen applications.

The second half of the book looks at the design and creation of mobile web sites: frameworks, compatibility et al get covered in extreme detail. Native application developers are largely left twiddling their thumbs…

As usual for O’Reilly, the book is well-written and readable even for non-native English speakers. Code examples are provided in various web languages; an ample amount of images is included for clarification where beneficial.

In the end, Mobile Design and Development is a great book if you want to create a mobile web app. Creators of native applications can’t use half of the book: if you are interested in the mobile design process, it is a good if somewhat paper-heavy tutorial. Web heads, on the other hand, should buy it straight away…the 23$ shouldn’t hurt…

O’Reilly has had a long tradition of publishing small and slim portable reference books. As C++ is an extremely common programming language in mobile, I was given a sample copy of their Pocket Reference. Size-wise, it is about as big as three PDAs next to another…

As this book is not intended as a learning but rather a reference tool, reading it from start to end is not as easy as with other books. However, I tried and succeeded – if you already have a pretty good understanding of C/C++ and object-oriented programming, you should be able to grasp the concepts within a few minutes of thinking around.

O’Reilly has put a lot of work into the index. If you are looking for something, you will usually be able to find the relevant piece of text very quickly.

Please let me put this in writing once again: you are NOT able to learn C++ from this book. Novices, look elsewhere! People familiar with Java may have a chance, but are also advised to look elsewhere.

Text-wise, there is nothing to bicker about. The book is clear (for a reference), and contains enough tables and graphs to visualize stuff where needed:

Cutting a long story short: the 10$ this book costs are well invested, especially if you tend to program offline a lot (netbook) and have a nasty habit of forgetting rarely used syntax elements. The book covers all important things except for using C code in C++ programs – this is a purchase you will not regret IF you are already proficient in C and have at least basic knowledge of object-oriented programming.

O’Reilly’s classic Designing Interfaces scored a rave review on TamsPalm some time ago. Designing Gestural Interfaces is from the same series – can it impress me as much as the forefather?

Dan Saffer starts put by looking at the history of user interaction and the physiological principles behind UI. His summary is well-done, but contains nothing which is new for a seasoned UI designer – not bad to have, but no selling point here.

After that, the book starts out by presenting finger and whole-body gestures which are “common” in Western cultures. People looking for a reference of gestures will be happy with this part – but if your OS vendor already specifies gestures, his UI rules are the ones to follow.

The last chapters of the book look at various development process-related things: how to test gestures, how to document them and what to expect in the future. People wanting to develop mobile apps will benefit a bit from the testing stuff, although a good beta test should be mostly straightforward.

The appendix contains an even larger list of gestures – if you are looking for a gesture dictionary, getting the book definitely pays out.

Like most other O’Reilly works, Designing Gestural interfaces is easy to read. It furthermore contains loads of photos, snapshots and sketches – an example page is below:

In the end, Designing Gestural Interfaces definitely is not a bad book. However, most of its contents are of limited value to the average mobile developer. If you aren’t into virtual reality / winning a motion-game contest, the steep asking price of 43$ can definitely be spent better elsewhere…

I stumbled across this book at a Viennese store specializing in book blow-out sales. As I was planning an advertising campaign at that time, I purchased it…expecting to find all kinds of cool stuff. But could it stack up?

First of all: this book covers dynamic campaigns implemented with Flash. This means that the included images alone don’t tell the full story – you have to read the book and look at the included DVD on a PC in order to fully grasp a campaign.

Advertising OnLine divides its campaigns by their subject matter: the chapters cover Food&Beverage, Media, Service&Retailer, Technology&Games, Transport and Miscellaneous ads. Each ad campaign is given one to three pages worth of photos and a badly-written description text (which comes in three languages:). While some campaigns are straightforward or boring, some of the ideas really made me think. For example, did you ever think about using an IM bot as advertising tool?

Mobile computing freaks will be happy to hear that the book covers various advertising campaigns for phones: Nokia, Motorola and the now-defunct Siemens Mobile are all in the mix.

The aforementioned chapters are divided by interviews with various creatives: as the book was written in 2005, these serve more as amusing reading than as insight.

Like with most photo books, the paper quality is insanely high. The entire book is printed on semi-glossy paper, which makes the pictures look lovely. Unfortunately, the text is very unclear and full of grammatical errors…I often read all three (English, German, French) versions of the text in order to grasp its meaning.

In the end, people expecting to learn about making the most of a small ad space will be gravely disappointed with the book. It instead looks at what future technologies like ShockWave and Flash can achieve (or will be able to achieve in the future) compared to classic GIF banners. If you ever wondered why banner designers use flash, like picture books and have 26$ and some time to spare, hit this Amazon link…