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How to Conserve the iPhone's Battery Life

September 2, 2010

The following excerpt is from the O'Reilly Publicaton iPhone: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition. Below the author gives some helpful tips on how to make the iPhone last longer on one charge. The battery life of the iPhone is either terrific or terrible, depending on your point of view—and which model you have. If you were an optimist, you’d point out that when these phones are using AT&...

Mobile Tools and Tricks with jQuery

By Matthew David
September 1, 2010

jQuery plugins you can use to build web sites specifically for mobile devices

How to Include Search in Your iPhone App Design

August 30, 2010

The final ribbon of standard interface chrome is the seek-and-you-shall-find search bar. If your app manages or accesses big collections of info, your audience will clamor for a way to search it. The search bar provides a standard interface for doing just that, offering a special text field with a magnifying glass icon to advertise its search savvy. The search field can include placeholder text (&...

Adding Rich Animation to your iPhone and Android Web Sites

By Matthew David
August 30, 2010

Both the iPhone and Android Web browsers are built using the same technology, WebKit. With this in mind, you can create Web sites optimized for WebKit that will run on both phones. The focus of this article is animation for the mobile phone. We will cover CSS3, SVG and CANVAS techniques you can use today.

iPad on iPad

August 24, 2010

I bought the iPad Missing Manual app on appstore -- but it's designed for the iPhone and comes out very poorly on the iPad. Very frustrating. Will you have an iPad-compatible version anytime soon?

When to Use SQLite instead of Core Data on the iPhone

August 23, 2010

This excerpt from Using SQLite explains the differences between Core Data and SQLite and will help you decide which to use when developing on the iPhone.When the iPhone and iPod touch were first released, Apple heavily advocated the use of SQLite. The SQLite library was provided as a system framework and was well documented, complete with code examples, in the SDK. With the release of version 3.0...

How to Support the iPhone with SQLite

August 23, 2010

Below we have a small excerpt from the O'Reilly publication USing SQLite. It's a few words from the author that speak to supporting the iPhone and its brethren with SQLite. When the iPhone and iPod touch were first released, Apple heavily advocated the use of SQLite. The SQLite library was provided as a system framework and was well documented, complete with code examples, in the SDK. Wi...

How to add more than one google/gmail Calendar to your iPad/iPhone

August 20, 2010

For those of you like me, who enjoy having an iPad and iPhone and use gmail's emailing and calendar services, when you set up your gmail account using the exchange method (see my other O'Reilly post ) which is in my opinion the best way to get 'push email' on your iOS device, you notice that only one of your calendars gets assigned. If you have more than one calendar, unless it'...

The Importance of Storyboarding Your iPhone App

August 13, 2010

Before you build, diagram your app's flow of screens, like a movie director preparing storyboard sketches for every scene of a shoot. Make sure that you have clean, untangled lines through your hierarchy of pages. Every path through your app should unfold like a quick story, following a logical chain of events to an expected conclusion. Along the way, each screen should tackle just one plot el...

Would you buy a Verizon iPhone?

August 13, 2010

I know this is dangerously close to Verizon-iPhone linkbait, but a recent post by John Gruber got me thinking about a legitimate question. Here's what he wrote: QuoteI don't think there’s anyone who doesn’t think Verizon could sell a lot of iPhones over the course of a year. But I think they could sell a lot of them right away. Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 units in the first three days i...

Four short links: 13 August 2010

By Nat Torkington
August 13, 2010

The Myth of Scientific Literacy -- I'd love it if there was a simple course we could send our elected officials on which would guarantee future science policy would be reliably high quality. Being educated in science (or even "about science") isn't going to do it. It's social connections that will. We need to keep our elected officials honest,...

What publishers can and should learn from "The Elements"

By Mac Slocum
August 12, 2010

Theodore Gray, author/creator of "The Elements," shares his thoughts on interactivity in ebooks, why programmers should be treated like authors, and why he believes the print form will continue to exist for quite some time.

Four short links: 11 August 2010

By Nat Torkington
August 11, 2010

10 Essential iPad Apps for Publication Designers -- a couple of interesting new suggestions here, including the New Zealand Herald (hated at home for including a bloated intro movie, but with interesting article presentation), and Paris Match (adding interactive features to almost every story). (via Simon St Laurent) Cooking in Silico: Heat Transfer in the Modern Kitchen (YouTube) --...

7 Myths of the Mobile Web - What's new in O'Reilly Answers: Using your phone as a modem, communicating with your manager, myths of the mobile web, and much more.

August 10, 2010

As the Web has moved onto mobile devices, developers have told themselves a lot of stories about what this means for their work. Some of those stories are true and others are misleading, confusing, or even dangerous. While the contexts in which we use our mobile devices are often extremely different from where and how we use our comfortable desktops, this doesn't mean that, as developers, we need to create two, three, or dozens of versions duplicating our work. It's not the mobile web; it's just the web! Read more.

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How to Make Use of the Tab Bar in Your iPhone App

August 9, 2010

The tab bar is a dock of buttons anchored at screen bottom, giving your audience a menu of options to choose from. The result is a tidily categorized app, with its primary features explicitly listed and labeled. Unlike the undifferentiated pile of cards in flat-page apps, the tab bar's categories divvy an app into neat silos. Tap a tab—one of the tab-bar buttons—to jump directly to the ass...

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