Books — Mobile & Wireless Computing: Programming

Mobile & Wireless Computing: Programming

Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps

Lowest new price: $19.15
Lowest used price: $11.97
List price: $24.99
Author: Gabe Zichermann

What do Foursquare, Zynga, Nike+, and Groupon have in common? These and many other brands use gamification to deliver a sticky, viral, and engaging experience to their customers. This book provides the design strategy and tactics you need to integrate game mechanics into any kind of consumer-facing website or mobile app. Learn how to use core game concepts, design patterns, and meaningful code samples to a create fun and captivating social environment.

Whether you're an executive, developer, producer, or product specialist, Gamification by Design will show you how game mechanics can help you build customer loyalty.

Discover the motivational framework game designers use to segment and engage consumers
Understand core game mechanics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and leaderboards
Engage your consumers with reward structures, positive reinforcement, and feedback loops
Combine game mechanics with social interaction for activities such as collecting, gifting, heroism, and status
Dive into case studies on Nike and Yahoo!, and analyze interactions at Google, Facebook, and Zynga
Get the architecture and code to gamify a basic consumer site, and learn how to use mainstream gamification APIs from Badgeville

"Turning applications into games is a huge trend. This book does a great job of identifying the core lasting principals you need to inspire your users to visit again and again."
—Adam Loving
Freelance Social Game Developer and founder of Twibes Twitter Groups

Similar Products:

Head First Mobile Web

Lowest new price: $20.00
Lowest used price: $12.97
List price: $44.99
Author: Lyza Danger Gardner

Mobile web usage is exploding. Soon, more web browsing will take place on phones and tablets than PCs. Your business needs a mobile strategy, but where do you start? Head First Mobile Web shows how to use the web tech- nology you’re already familiar with to make sites and apps that work on any device of any size. Put your JavaScript, CSS media query, and HTML5 skills to work, and then optimize your site to perform its best in the demanding mobile market. Along the way, you’ll discover how to adapt your business strategy to target specific devices.

Navigate the increasingly complex mobile landscape
Take both technical and strategic approaches to mobile web design
Use the latest development techniques—including Responsive Web Design and server-side device detection with WURFL
Learn quickly through images, puzzles, stories, and quizzes

We think your time is too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Mobile Web uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.

Similar Products:

Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, Color Edition

Lowest new price: $24.17
Lowest used price: $18.99
List price: $44.99
Author: Theresa Neil

When you’re under pressure to produce a well designed, easy-to-navigate mobile app, there’s no time to reinvent the wheel. This concise book provides a handy reference to 70 mobile app design patterns, illustrated by more than 400 screenshots from current iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian apps.

User experience professional Theresa Neil (Designing Web Interfaces) walks you through design patterns in 10 separate categories, including anti-patterns. Whether you’re designing a simple iPhone application or one that’s meant to work for every popular mobile OS on the market, these patterns provide solutions to common design challenges. This print edition is in full color.

Pattern categories include:

Navigation: get patterns for primary and secondary navigation
Forms: break the industry-wide habits of bad form design
Tables and lists: display only the most important information
Search, sort, and filter: make these functions easy to use
Tools: create the illusion of direct interaction
Charts: learn best practices for basic chart design
Invitations: invite users to get started and discover features
Controls and feedback: help users perform actions, and provide them with timely feedback
Help: integrate help pages into a smaller form factor

"It’s a super handy catalog that I can flip to for ideas."
—Bill Scott, Senior Director of Web Development at PayPal

"Just a quick thanks to express my sheer gratitude for this pub, it has been a guide for me reworking a design for an app already in production!"
—Agatha June, UX designer

Similar Products:

Designing Mobile Interfaces

Lowest new price: $18.45
Lowest used price: $13.96
List price: $49.99
Author: Steven Hoober

With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available today, your app has to capture users immediately. This book provides practical techniques to help you catch—and keep—their attention. You’ll learn core principles for designing effective user interfaces, along with a set of common patterns for interaction design on all types of mobile devices.

Mobile design specialists Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman have collected and researched 76 best practices for everything from composing pages and displaying information to the use of screens, lights, and sensors. Each pattern includes a discussion of the design problem and solution, along with variations, interaction and presentation details, and antipatterns.

Compose pages so that information is easy to locate and manipulate
Provide labels and visual cues appropriate for your app’s users
Use information control widgets to help users quickly access details
Take advantage of gestures and other sensors
Apply specialized methods to prevent errors and the loss of user-entered data
Enable users to easily make selections, enter text, and manipulate controls
Use screens, lights, haptics, and sounds to communicate your message and increase user satisfaction

"Designing Mobile Interfaces is another stellar addition to O’Reilly’s essential interface books. Every mobile designer will want to have this thorough book on their shelf for reference."

—Dan Saffer, Author of Designing Gestural Interfaces

Similar Products:

Hacking Exposed Wireless, Second Edition

Lowest new price: $25.00
Lowest used price: $22.16
List price: $49.99
Author: Johnny Cache

The latest wireless security solutions

Protect your wireless systems from crippling attacks using the detailed security information in this comprehensive volume. Thoroughly updated to cover today's established and emerging wireless technologies, Hacking Exposed Wireless, second edition reveals how attackers use readily available and custom tools to target, infiltrate, and hijack vulnerable systems. This book discusses the latest developments in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and DECT hacking, and explains how to perform penetration tests, reinforce WPA protection schemes, mitigate packet injection risk, and lock down Bluetooth and RF devices. Cutting-edge techniques for exploiting Wi-Fi clients, WPA2, cordless phones, Bluetooth pairing, and ZigBee encryption are also covered in this fully revised guide.

Build and configure your Wi-Fi attack arsenal with the best hardware and software tools
Explore common weaknesses in WPA2 networks through the eyes of an attacker
Leverage post-compromise remote client attacks on Windows 7 and Mac OS X
Master attack tools to exploit wireless systems, including Aircrack-ng, coWPAtty, Pyrit, IPPON, FreeRADIUS-WPE, and the all new KillerBee
Evaluate your threat to software update impersonation attacks on public networks
Assess your threat to eavesdropping attacks on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and DECT networks using commercial and custom tools
Develop advanced skills leveraging Software Defined Radio and other flexible frameworks
Apply comprehensive defenses to protect your wireless devices and infrastructure

Similar Products:

App Inventor: Create Your Own Android Apps

Lowest new price: $22.69
Lowest used price: $19.96
List price: $39.99
Author: David Wolber

Yes, you can create your own apps for Android phones—and it's easy to do. This extraordinary book introduces App Inventor for Android, a powerful visual tool that lets anyone build apps for Android-based devices. Learn the basics of App Inventor with step-by-step instructions for more than a dozen fun projects, such as creating location-aware apps, data storage, and apps that include decision-making logic.

The second half of the book features an Inventor's manual to help you understand the fundamentals of app building and computer science. App Inventor makes an excellent textbook for beginners and experienced developers alike.

Design games and other apps with 2D graphics and animation
Create custom multi-media quizzes and study guides
Create a custom tour of your city, school, or workplace
Use an Android phone to control a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robot
Build location-aware apps by working with your phone’s sensors
Explore apps that incorporate information from the Web
Learn computer science as you build your apps

Similar Products:

Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design (Voices That Matter)

Lowest new price: $17.39
Lowest used price: $15.45
List price: $34.99
Author: Giles Colborne

In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications. It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves.

Similar Products:

Mobile Development with C#: Building Native iOS, Android, and Windows Phone Applications

Lowest new price: $16.26
Lowest used price: $12.99
List price: $24.99
Author: Greg Shackles

It's true: you can build native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone with C# and the .NET Framework--with help from MonoTouch and Mono for Android. This hands-on guide shows you how to reuse one codebase across all three platforms by combining the business logic layer of your C# app with separate, fully native UIs. It's an ideal marriage of platform-specific development and the "write once, run everywhere" philosophy.
By building a series of simple applications, you'll experience the advantages of using .NET in mobile development and learn how to write complete apps that access the unique features of today's three most important mobile platforms.

Learn the building blocks for building applications on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone
Discover how the Mono tools interact with iOS and Android
Use several techniques and patterns for maximizing non-UI code reuse
Determine how much functionality can go into the shared business logic layer
Connect to external resources with .NET's rich networking stack
Read and write data using each platform's filesystem and local database
Create apps to explore the platforms' location and mapping capabilities

Similar Products:

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web & Mobile Application Design (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

Lowest new price: $21.51
Lowest used price: $16.70
List price: $39.99
Author: Robert Hoekman Jr.

Designing the Obvious belongs in the toolbox of every person charged with the design and development of Web-based software, from the CEO to the programming team. Designing the Obvious explores the character traits of great Web applications and uses them as guiding principles of application design so the end result of every project instills customer satisfaction and loyalty. These principles include building only whats necessary, getting users up to speed quickly, preventing and handling errors, and designing for the activity. Designing the Obvious does not offer a one-size-fits-all development process--in fact, it lets you use whatever process you like. Instead, it offers practical advice about how to achieve the qualities of great Web-based applications and consistently and successfully reproduce them.

This latest edition updates examples to show the guiding principles of application design in action on today's web, plus adds new chapters on strategy and persuasion. It offers practical advice about how to achieve the qualities of great Web-based applications and consistently and successfully reproduce them.

Similar Products:

Corona SDK Mobile Game Development: Beginner's Guide

Lowest new price: $41.42
Lowest used price: $43.65
List price: $49.99
Author: Michelle M. Fernandez

Similar Products:

Apparel & Accessories	Books	Classical Music	DVD	Electronics & Photo	Gourmet Food and Groceries	Health & Personal Care	Home & Garden	Industrial & Scientific	Kitchen
Popular Music	Musical Instruments	Outdoor Living	Computer Hardware	Computer Software	Sporting Goods	Tools	Toys and Games	VHS Video	Video Games