Book Description

With the millions of apps in the crowded Apple iTunes App Store, it can be difficult to get your apps noticed. How can you make your app stand out from the crowd and get it the reviews it deserves?

iOS Wow Factor shows you how to get noticed! It explains how to go beyond the basics and where to “break the rules” to give your users a “wow” experience! You’ll learn to use standard controls, as well as to create non-standard controls and high-impact custom interactions to realize truly compelling app designs.

Get grounded in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) so that you can appreciate all its wisdom. From that excellent foundation, move beyond the HIG and learn how to ensure that all your apps have that “wow” factor. Learn all about user experience (UX) design techniques, with and beyond Apple’s HIG, and how to move your apps out of mundane design and into innovative user experiences. Examine the characteristics and constraints of the iOS platform and how to leverage its strengths to maximum effect in your apps.

iOS Wow Factor explains what makes a successful mobile app design, and how to apply those principles of success to your own apps. Once you get the iOS Wow Factor into your apps, you can watch your app adoption rate increase and gain the traction it needs to succeed and earn a profit in the Apple iTunes App Store.

Find out everything you’ll need to “wow” your future customers!

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Book Description

Create compelling 2D games with Learn cocos2d Game Development with iOS 5. This book shows you how to use the powerful cocos2d game engine to develop games for iPhone and iPad with tilemaps, virtual joypads, Game Center, and more.

It teaches you:

• The process and best practices of mobile game development, including sprite batching, texture atlases, parallax scrolling, touch and accelerometer input.
• How to enhance your games using the Box2D and Chipmunk physics engines and other cocos2d-related tools and libraries.
• How to add UIKit views to cocos2d and how to add cocos2d to UIKit apps.
• The ins and outs of the Kobold2D development environment for cocos2d and its preconfigured libraries, including cocos3d and Lua.

Best of all, Learn cocos2d Game Development with iOS 5 will have you making games right from the very start. It guides you step-by-step through the creation of sample games. These fun examples are modeled after popular App Store games and teach you key concepts of the cocos2d game engine and relevant tools like TexturePacker (texture atlas), PhysicsEditor (physics collision shapes), Particle Designer (particle effects), Glyph Designer (bitmap fonts), and others.

This book offers a rock-solid introduction to creating games made entirely with cocos2d and little or no iOS 5 SDK and OpenGL code. It also details alternative implementations, identifies the best free and commercial tools for cocos2d game development Download Now »

Book Description

A unique behind-the-scenes look at what makes an application succeed in the App Store

With this invaluable book, Tyson McCann offers a non-technical look at all aspects of the iPhone application development landscape and gets to the core of what makes a popular—and profitable—application. From knowing your customer to to launching a successful app, and everything in between, this must-have guide navigates such topics as developing a concept, analyzing the competition, considerations before the launch, marketing, building a community, and maintaining market share… to name a few.

Coverage includes:

• Setting Your Goals, Costs, and Expectations
• Researching the App Store Market
• Knowing Your Customer
• Plotting the Stages of Development
• Guidelines and Expectations for Developing Your App
• Creating Free and Freemium Apps
• Creating Paid and Premium Apps
• Adopting Apple’s Approach
• Riding the Social Networking Wave
• Feedback, Maintaining, and Scaling Download Now »

Book Description

With iOS 5, Apple added more than 200 new features to the iPad 2, but there’s still no printed guide to using all its amazing capabilities. That’s where this full-color Missing Manual comes in. You’ll learn how to stuff your iPad with media, organize your personal life, wirelessly stream content to and from your tablet, stay connected to friends, and much more.

The important stuff you need to know:

• Build your media library. Fill your iPad with music, movies, TV shows, eBooks, eMagazines, photos, and more.
• Go wireless. Sync content between your computer and iPad—no wires needed.
• Get online. Connect through WiFi or Wi-Fi + 3G, and surf the Web using the iPad’s new tabbed browser.
• Consolidate email. Read and send messages from any of your email accounts.
• Get social. Use built-in apps like iMessage, Twitter, and Ping to stay in touch.
• Store stuff in iCloud. Stash your content online for free, and sync up all your devices automatically.
• Interact with your iPad. Learn new finger moves and undocumented tips, tricks, and shortcuts.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Get to Know Your iPad
Chapter 2. Interact with Your iPad
Chapter 3. Get Online
Chapter 4. Surf the Web Download Now »

Book Description

After you’ve uncovered the basics in Lion, Mac Kung Fu is your next step. You’ll learn how to master everyday tools such as the Dock, Spotlight, Mission Control, Launchpad, and Dashboard. You’ll discover other amazingly useful tools and built-in add-ons that you never knew existed. You’ll customize the OS X interface, refine your workflow, learn valuable security tricks, work better with photos, movies and documents, and test your Mac hardware. You’ll wow friends with your insanely great Mac knowledge!

Mac Kung Fu details things even Mac Geniuses don’t know. And why should they? Many of the tips in this book exploit settings or experimental features never officially made public.

Each tip in this unique book is deliberately short and readable, and you can dip in and out whenever you want. Most take less than a minute to complete, yet the results last for a lifetime of better computing.

What You Need: Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and above.

About the Author
Keir Thomas is a Linux Journal award-winning author who has been writing about Linux, operating systems and computer hardware for over a decade. Formerly a computer magazine journalist and editor, working on titles such as Linux User and Developer, Linux Magazine and PC Utilities, his other book titles include Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Third Edition Download Now »

Book Description

The best iPhone applications are the ones that demonstrate smooth, fast, efficient and optimal performance. An application should be designed to run at 200 mph, but operate just as smoothly as it would at 5 mph. Developing an application that supports such a wide range of performance needs is no small task and requires an understanding of the basic elements of performance as well as a strong strategy.

This book covers every aspect of tuning, optimizing, and squeezing every last bit of performance out of an iOS project. From application architecture and design to development and deployment, readers will be guided through the entire process of tuning an iOS application for high performance.

Every line of code presents an opportunity to improve upon the effective performance of an application. This book begins with the fundamentals of performance, demonstrating the impact poor performance can have on the success of an application. Apple’s App Store is riddled with applications that fall just short of success and it isn’t too much of a stretch to attribute many of these failures to a lack of optimization. Readers will be lead through each chapter, learning every aspect of performance tuning from simple syntax tips and tricks to advanced process management, and network and memory optimizations.

In addition to theories, syntax, and detailed code examples, readers will learn to take advantage of Apple’s powerful performance measurement and benchmarking utilities to identify the specific components of an iOS project that might need attention. Download Now »