TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

PackT can be considered the newest kid on the block of tech publishing – consider them the APress of “design-related technologies”. Their book on “User Programming for Busy Programmers” hit my desk. But can the 80-page booklet stack up?

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…

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…