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Augmented reality as etiquette coach

By Mac Slocum
July 30, 2010

Alasdair Allen, author of "Programming iPhone Sensors," says real-time facial identification -- the sort that pairs names and faces on the fly -- is closer than you might think. He expands on that topic and a number of others in this video interview.

Which Social Gaming companies are Hiring

By Ben Lorica
July 29, 2010

Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company, but what other independent companies are growing? To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings1 to detect recent...

Another reason to build apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Testing - What's new in O'Reilly Answers: iPhone apps, ebooks on the iPad, CSS and JavaScript, Objective-C, SharePoint, and much more.

July 29, 2010

In a past interview with Jonathan Stark, author of "Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript," he noted that cross-platform availability and broad distribution are two reasons why HTML/CSS/JavaScript development is worth pursuing. During a recent interview at OSCON, Stark touched on a number of points from why developers should check out PhoneGap to why WebKit adoption is good for developers. Read more.

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iPad Albums Via Publish Services

By Gene McCullagh
July 29, 2010

In the previous article, Creating iPad Albums With Lightroom, I talked about using Matt Kloskowski's export presets to create albums for your iPad. This method is accessible by both Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3 users. However, if you have moved on to Lightroom 3 you can take advantage of one of its great new features--Publish Services. (Thanks to John Beardsworth whose comment on the previous article motivated me to get this article out of draft sooner rather than later!) A lot of the attention Publish Services has gotten revolves around the link between Lightroom and online services such as Flickr, Zenfolio, SmugMug, etc.. But the other side of this feature is the ability to create links between Lightroom and your drives. And it is this aspect we will exploit here.

No Images on the iPad with the PDF "Head First - HTML with CSS and XHTML"

July 28, 2010

Well, so far downloading the eBooks and reading them on the iPad works perfectly. I've tried both ePub (iBooks) and PDFs (GoodReader) and it works well. The only exception to this is the eBook "Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML". While I can read it perfectly on the Adobe Reader on my PC it won't display any pictures in the reader(s) on the iPad. I tried - Good Reader - iBoo...

Jailbreaking your iPhone is legal: what changes?

By RJ Owen
July 27, 2010

Yesterday the U.S. Copyright office passed down new rules under the DCMA changing making Jailbreaking legal on iPhones. This is all good and nice, but is it going to result in any real change in the mobile phone market? While the new rules might at least incent Apple to play a little nicer, will consumers benefit in any way?

How To Read O’Reilly eBooks on the iPad

July 26, 2010

This page decribes the ways in which you can load O’Reilly ebooks onto your iPad. First, we’ll look at how to load and read ePubs and PDFs from O’Reilly ebook bundles. Then, we’ll cover how to extract an ePub file from an O’Reilly iPhone/iPod ebook application, available in the iTunes Store. eBook Bundles O’Reilly ebook bundles typically include four formats: ePubPDFMobiAndriod APK M...

Creating iPad Albums With Lightroom

By Gene McCullagh
July 26, 2010

The iPad is an excellent tool for showing off your work. Chances are, though, if you are a Lightroom user you don't want to fiddle with iPhoto just to get your images ready for your iPad and sorted into albums. And if you are a Windows based Lightroom user then iPhoto isn't an option for you.

Xcode 4 Preview 2 Now Available

By Andrew Trice
July 23, 2010

For those of you fellow iPad and iPhone developers out there, a preview version of Xcode 4 has been released. I'm personally looking forward to the integrated single window in the IDE, as opposed to multiple separate applications, the enhanced debugger, and enhanced code editing and navigation tools. Not to mention, the faster LLVM 2.0 compiler.

Designing iPhone Apps: The Rule of Thumb

July 23, 2010

The following is an excerpt from the O'Reilly publication Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. It gives some useful tips and things to keep in mind when designing your own iPhone app. Thumbs are marvelous. It's our thumbs, along with our affection for celebrity gossip, that separate us from the beasts, but they do have limited range and flexibility. While a thumb can manage to sweep the...

Four short links: 22 July 2010

By Nat Torkington
July 22, 2010

Boomerang -- a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user's point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is. From Yahoo!....

How to use UIAutomation to create iPhone UI tests - What's new in O'Reilly Answers: iPhone UI tests, beautiful code, Objective-c, cloud computing, CS5, and much more.

July 21, 2010

One of the more useful (from a developer standpoint) features coming in iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) is the UIAutomation tool. This lets you run an automated set of tests against an application, and test to see if they had the expected results. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is minimal documentation for the tool, so here's a quick walkthrough of how to use it. Read more.

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Four short links: 20 July 2010

By Nat Torkington
July 20, 2010

Dangerous Prototypes -- "a new open source hardware project every month". Sample project: Flash Destroyer, which writes and verifies EEPROM chips until they blow out. Wabit -- GPLv3 reporting tool. Because No Respectable MBA Programme Would Admit Me (Mike Shaver) -- excellent book recommendations. The Most Prescient Footnote Ever (David Pennock) -- In footnote 14 of Chapter 5 (p....

App Inventor and the culture wars

By Mike Loukides
July 15, 2010

Google's new App Inventor gets to the heart of the cultural difference between Apple and Google. If you haven't seen it yet, App Inventor is an experimental new SDK for the Android platform. What's different about App Inventor is that there's practically no coding per se; it's an entirely visual language. Its heritage goes back to Logo, but more directly,...

How to implement iAd on your iPhone applications

July 15, 2010

With the introduction if iOS 4, Apple have also introduced iAds, a mobile advertising platform that aims to convey a new concept of interactive marketing on your smart-device. Through CSS3 and multi-touching, you will get a WebKit-powered framework to deliver optimal user experience right within your app. This layer in fact sits on top of your application, so it won’t use your app-reserved memor...

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