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…

William Rice starts out by looking at a few “common myths” of the trade. What is user training, what isn’t it? Who needs to be trained?

Afterward, the book takes a strictly wizard-like approach. A repeating template not dissimilar to the one found in use cases takes you step-to-step from nothing to running user demo, which can be deployed to third-party instructors.

Style-wise, PackT is different from other, more “established” publishers. Their visual presentation is more “to the bone”, and less playful – the whole book didn’t contain a single image. Nevertheless, it was well written and easy to understand.

In the end, I predict that PackT has a bright future ahead of it. This book fulfills its need – if you have just been enlisted to teach at an university or often write manuals and online help systems, you definitely can benefit from it. The price of 13$ for the paperback is ok…

Further informations can be found at ReadWriteWeb.com

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.

The book starts out by looking at the basics of the .NET framework – what is CIL, why are things implemented the way they are and so on. The next two chapters look at variables and strings: this is not ideal for beginners, as it does not allow you to start coding immediately.

Want to find out more? Visit our sister site TamsPPC:
http://tamsppc.tamoggemon.com/2009/08/11/beginning-c-2008-the-review/

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…

GNU’s image manipulation software (GIMP) is free…but is not particularly intuitive. Can Akkana Peck’s book fix you up?

Beginning GIMP starts out with a thorough introduction to the basics of image editing. Even though most of this should not be new to seasoned developers, it nevertheless makes for an interesting read…and leaves you well prepared for the first steps into large-scale image manipulation.

Once these basics are done, Beginning GIMP moves on to looking at the creation of new images using GIMP. Topics covered include nasties like layers, paths and feathered selections. The explanations are presented in a down-to-earth way, and are understandable even for non-mathematical heads.

Akkana’s GIMP tour ends with a look at filters, layer compositions and other artistic stuff. The book then ends with a few appendices looking at various technical topics related co compiling and installation on various platforms.

Like most other APress books, Beginning GIMP is a pleasure to read. Paper quality is exceptional, the text is clearly written and the images make understanding stuff easy. The index is pretty good, too – looking something up on the go is more than comfortable.

In the end, Beginning GIMP is one book which definitely belong on your desk. Its price pays off the moment you fire up GIMP for the first time and save the money needed for a graphist and a PhotoShop license. The clearly-written text will have you cooking up images in no time – the price of 32$ is a sound investment…

Plugging them in required an unnatural amount of force, and getting them back out of my device turned out to be impossible due to the soft and rubbery finish of both plug and cable. But they were detected as headset at the least.

Unfortunately, this recognition did not mean much. Audio was tinny all the time except when I kept the center button of the remote firmly pressed…the moment I let go of the button, tracks once again sounded like they were being played back through a thick wall of fog.

From my point of view, the 30 Euros invested turned out to be a major waste – 5 Euro headsets will likely deliver better audio quality than these when paired up with an X1 or similar non-Apple handset. Apple: this pair of headphones goes straight back to the shop where I bought them. In case anyone of you is in a similar situation: stay far away from Apple’s Earphones with Remote and Mic.

- color: Navy Blue (+10$)
- clip: belt loop (+4$)
- style of the Fortte logo: Silver Tone
- no personalization
________________
whole case: $ 38.99

Finally the case looks like that:

The Treo fits exactly into the case and stays there, even if you open it and hold it upside-down:

When the Treo is inserted, the case stays small and handy. In that way you nearly won’t realize that it is there when it is attached to your belt.

And that’s how it looks from the back:

During my test I noted the following things:
Pros:
- very durable and significant case (made from real leather)
- stylish look and feel
- small in size

Cons:
- As the case is opened on the top it can be difficult to get your Treo when the case is under your jacket
- The case has no place for a SD card. So you have to look for an alternative place when you use more than one SD card.

The case is available via Fortte – the price starts at $24.99. In my opinion the case is worth its money
http://www.fortte.com/scr/showproduct.php/9?type=0

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…