book

Mead Composition Book, One Wide-Ruled Notebook with 100 Sheets, Black Marble

Oct 8

Product Description Classic comp book design elements 100 sheets wide ruled, white paper. Class schedule on the cover page and the multiplication table, conversion table, grammar, and tips on the inside cover is tailored for today's busy students. Stable with secure stitching ensures long-lasting value.
Mead Composition Book, One Wide-Ruled Notebook with 100 Sheets, Black Marble

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Mead Composition Book, 100 sheets, Wide Ruled, 1 Notebook, Black Marble

Aug 9

Laptops

Classic book design comprising 100 sheets wide ruled white paper. The timetable on the cover page and the conversion table multiplication table, grammar, and tips on the third cover page is available on today's busy students. Durable cover with secure sewn binding ensures lasting value.…
Buy Mead Composition Book, 100 sheets, Wide Ruled, 1 Notebook, Black Marble at Amazon

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Book Reveals Rare Apple Prototype Designs

Jul 31

Laptop News

Jonathan Ive wasn’t always the Grand Overlord designer and demi-God at Apple. Before Ive re-imagined the Macintosh, other talented souls attempted to shape the next-generation of Apple products with the clean industrial design the company is famous for.

In the 1980s, Frog Design was charged with producing design prototypes for Apple — specifically the Apple IIc and some early models of Macintosh. 9to5Mac reports that the founder of Frog Design, Harmut Esslinger, has published a book which features many of those early designs.

frog_design_prototypes

“A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business” is all about the role “smart” product design plays in the success of a business. As well as gorgeous pictures, the book includes background stories from Esslinger detailing the design and prototype process.

“We worked closely with Steve Jobs and Apple’s developers to innovate computer usability and appearance, resulting in iconic products with no historic precedent.”

My personal favorite is that funky laptop. Can you see elements in these prototypes that have influenced the Apple products we use today? Share your thoughts in the comments, and tell me if you agree those earbuds are just short of being classified as a torture device!

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REVIEWS: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – PS3 – First Look

Jul 31

Laptops

Can this build on the first outing?
Among Thieves - First Look 0

Due out in October, Uncharted 2 is the follow up to the hugely successful action romp on the PS3, we managed to get a hands-off with one of the levels of the game to see where or not you should start to get excited.

We say hands-off because we weren’t actually allowed to grab the controller from the games assistant producer Caley Roberts as he walked us through the new game, but that didn’t stop as asking plenty of questions, seeing the new moves and features up close (it was a big TV) and basically getting a good feel for the game enough to give you our first look impressions here.

If, and we say if, the game lives up to what we saw for our 30 minute run through, the game looks likely to appease Uncharted fans and newcomers alike.

You’re back, just like Indiana Jones, for another installment of treasure hunting, bad guys and cheeky comments to your female sidekick. Sully and Elena from the first outing are sill present, but are this time more sideline characters. Instead this time you get some other chick, called Chloe, that isn’t really that important as you can’t play her in the single player levels anyway.

As before it’s all about the treasure and this time it s set in the Far East searching for some lost treasure of Marco Polo’s while the lead bad guy gets his goons in on the action in an attempt to get their first.

If it sounds familiar that’s because it is, the first Uncharted featured a female sidekick and a lead bad guy with a bunch of goons that see you racing to beat to get to some lost treasure as if you are Lara Croft.

So what have you got to do? Evade the goons, find the treasure and well probably kiss the girl.

Get pass the storyline, which to be honest we weren’t able to experience as much as we would have liked, (were told there are plenty of twists and turns, but no aliens or crystal skulls though), and it’s the gameplay that’s been the main focus for the new release.

Jumping is still the main focus, however it has been improved. Drake can now climb up ladders for example without having to pretend to leap to everyone as if his life depends on it.

There is also a greater emphasis on puzzle solving with the puzzles being notably harder and less of a call to action when you enter a room with a puzzle in it. You can still access the book to help you out, but it won’t open automatically when you enter a room that requires any thought.

Get pass the jumping and the puzzle solving and the fighting and shooting modes have been improved as well. Grenade throwing is no longer on the six-axis with assistant producer Roberts telling us that feedback from the first Uncharted suggested it was too confusing. “We did it because we could,” he explained. In Uncharted 2 there isn’t any six-axis support with grenades going to one of the shoulder buttons.

In our walkthrough we noticed Roberts was clearly a fan of the new button location, those bad guys didn’t know what hit them.

But grenades aren’t going to cut it in the long haul – we always seemed to run out in the first version anyway – so in a move that follows the brilliant Bourne Ultimatium, melee moves have now been increased. It’s not as intense or as in-depth as the Bourne game, but you can swashbuckle your way out of trouble countering the odd fist you come into rather than having to result in whipping out your weapon every time.

It’s a welcomed addition and one that fits in nicely with another new feature; stealth mode. Yep, Splinter Cell has come to the world of tomb raiding and there are levels that you can complete without getting out your gun at all. There is more than one way to complete a level.

With around 12 – 15 hours of gameplay for the single player levels this isn’t like Uncharted likely to last you that long, enjoyable as it probably will be.

So as a backup there are a number of multiplayer and co-op options available including the ability to play a three man co-op game online with your mates.

The co-op levels aren’t just a rehash of the single player levels with more baddies, and that gives us hope in getting longer longevity out of any online mode.

There is of course the usual capture the flag, five on five multiplayer stuff as well.

Verdict:
From what we’ve seen of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, it looks to be very much the same as Uncharted but with an improved gameplay.

Grumbles you might have, as we are sure any Uncharted fan will tell you (including us) that’s alright by me.

We enjoyed the first one very much, with half of the pocket-lint team playing it through to the end, so the notion of more jumping, more puzzle solving, more fending off goons sounds appealing. very appealing.

If, though you tried the first one and weren’t impressed, the follow up isn’t like to do it for you either.

Still we look forward to getting a full hands-on with the new title when it hits the PS3 in October.

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Gaming PS3 Sony First Look

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – PS3 – First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:09:47 +0100

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43 iPhone Development Resources

Jun 2

Laptop News

Programming for the iPhone is still pretty new. It might be a bit tougher to find iPhone developer resources but we found a bunch that will get you through building any iPhone app you might be starting on. Check out our list of our favorite developer books, blogs, podcasts, screencasts, open-source libraries, communities, forums, conferences, training, and more!

Books

Beginning iPhone Development

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

This is the go-to book for beginning iPhone developers by Jeff Lamarche and Dave Mark. It takes you from downloading the SDK to creating your very own apps. The official page and support site: http://iphonedevbook.com/

Programming in Objective-C 2.0

This is the book to get if you’re just starting out programming. It assumes you have no prior programming knowledge before picking it up. It’s highly recommended for people who don’t know any programming and want to learn Objective-C. Not a lot of iPhone specific stuff in this one, but a lot of this knowledge will carry over when you do want to create iPhone apps.

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

This book assumes you know a bit of C/C++ and it’s a really good book for getting started with Apple’s developer frameworks. There isn’t a lot of iPhone specific stuff in this book but a lot of what you learn carries over into iPhone development.

Pragmatic Programmers iPhone SDK Development

This book is in beta still so you can only get the PDF. It was originally scheduled to be released by now, but they are updating it to include iPhone SDK 3.0. It’s still worth it to get the PDF. I’ve went through it and it is fantastic. The book is now set to be released in September.

The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

This book is full of code snippets that will help a lot of people with common tasks that Apple’s iPhone SDK doesn’t provide. There are some code blunders in this book, but luckily they’ve fixed the code and put it up here. They also have movies at this site that demonstrate what each mini-project does.

iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development

The iPhone in Action book covers both native and web programming in step-by-step tutorials. It’s a complete primer to iPhone development.

Blogs

Mobile Orchard

The best iPhone developer blog I’ve seen. It’s written by Dan Grigsby and Ari Braginsky. I recommend you start with the top posts on the right sidebar and go through all the archives. Pretty much all of the articles are gold.

iCodeBlog

This blog has some of the best iPhone app building tutorials on the web. They have newbie tutorials as well as multi-part advanced tutorials ranging from Hello World to game development. The “ToDo List Using SQLite” tutorial series is a good start for a new developer to learn a breadth of concepts.

iPhone Development Central

The meat of this site is the video tutorials. The videos are separated into different levels of complexity. Good site for audio/visual learners.

Dr. Touch

Dr. Touch gives us a mix of specific programming solutions as well his experiences with the App Store and his sales. The recipes section of his blog have really useful code snippets to help you build your app.

iPhone Development

Jeff Lamarche is also the author of Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. He keeps his blog updated constantly with cutting edge code and even a guide to surviving WWDC.

Keyvisuals iPhone Development

This blog isn’t updated as often as some of the others, but the articles that do come out are really useful. My favorite recent one is How to Detect Network Availability.

71squared

71squared has some great iPhone game development tutorial collections. It is updated quite often and anyone interested in iPhone game development should check it out.

How to Make iPhone Apps

It’s a fusion of iPhone app marketing and coding. Most of the site is focused on marketing your app.

iPhone SDK Articles

This blog isn’t updated that much these days but the articles are still useful. It’s 100 percent dedicated to code tutorials.

148apps.biz

Jeff Scott writes about various iPhone app marketing tips and analytics. The blog is focused on the business side of iPhone apps. It’s fairly new and looks very promising.

iPhone developer:tips

A how-to focused blog run by John Muchow. The posts are put together in nice bite-size pieces.

Bill Dudney is an author/screencaster with the Pragmatic Programmers family. The books and screencasts he makes are good for beginners but a lot of the stuff on his blog address more complicated coding issues and bugs in the SDK.

Podcasts/Screencasts

iPhone Application Programming

Stanford iPhone Application Programming Course

Stanford open-sourced their lecture, slides, and course material to the world. It’s available for free in iTunes. Watch the presentation by Loren Brichter of Tweetie fame when you get a chance.

Mobile Orchard Podcast

Awesome podcast series with iPhone app developers and their successes (and struggles) running iPhone app businesses. They always have A-list guests.

Pragmatic Programmer’s Screencast Series

If you’re more of a video learner, start with the Coding in Objective-C 2.0 and Becoming Productive in Xcode screencasts. Follow that with the 5-part Writing Your First iPhone Application screencast. If you really want to get fancy with transitions and animations, check out the Creating a Compelling User Interface with Core Animation screencast.

Objective-C for Rubyists

Peepcode is usually known for their Ruby resources but they have a great screencast that teaches you about Objective-C. It’s edited by Scott Stevenson of great Objective-C resource, CocoaDevCentral.

The App Show

Great conversations about everything realated to iPhone apps. The podcasts are about an hour or so long.

iPhone Alley

The iPhone Alley Podcast is a weekly roundtable with different iPhone app media peeps and creators. Each episode is very entertaining.

Schenk Studios

This site has some great video tutorials and a lot of them too. He’s made 25 of them including a sneak peek at some new 3.0 features.

Open-Source Libraries

Three 20

Joe Hewitt’s Three20 Open-Source Objective-C library

Three20 is a collection of iPhone UI classes, like a photo viewer, and general utilities, like an HTTP disk cache. Three20 is derived from the Facebook iPhone app, which is one of the most downloaded iPhone apps ever.

Bullet Physics Engine

Bullet is a free, professional 3D game multiphysics library used in some popular games in the App Store.

Cocos2d Framework

Cocos2d for the iPhone is a framework for building 2D games for the iPhone and iPod touch. There’s a great community around this open-source engine so there’s plenty of support to help you get your iPhone game out there.

Matt Legend Gemmell – Cocoa Source Code

Matt Gemmell has some great code out there for the community including MGTwitterEngine, the Twitter API used in iPhone apps Birdhouse and Twitteriffic.

Appsamuck

An open-source collection of 31 mini-iPhone app projects to get you up and running fast.

Communities/Forums

iPhone Dev SDK

The greatest iPhone developer community on the internet. Chris Stewart’s site boasts nearly 6,000 registered users. The forums are very active. You’ll find yourself visiting this site at least once a day.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language. Every question asked on the site will almost always get a correct answer.

MacRumors Forums for iPhone Programming

Great community of developers on this forum. They even include some nice guides for getting started with iPhone development.

Conferences/Training

WWDC

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference

WWDC is Apple’s official developer conference. All the cutting edge programming topics are taught here. The 2009 one runs from June 8-12. WWDC is the Mac daddy of all iPhone conferences. Get it? Mac daddy? I’m here all night folks.

360|iDev

360|iDev is the premiere iPhone, iPod touch developer conference in the world. The next one will be a 4-day event and will take place September 27 to 30, 2009 in Denver, CO. They have a call for papers right now if you want to make a debut as a conference speaker.

Pragmatic Studio’s iPhone Development Course

Here you will learn how to build iPhone applications from experienced iPhone developers Bill Dudney and Daniel Steinberg in this 4-day training course. The next one runs August 4-7, 2009 in Reston, VA.

iPhoneDevCamp

iPhoneDevCamp is the brainchild of Raven and Dom. The event format is “unconference” or Barcamp-style, featuring content from the participants themselves. There are satellite events held all over the country. The next one is this August.

Game Developers Conference

This conference is for all game developers and there’s an increasing number of mobile app game developers. If you’re a game developer or want to be one, this is the one game developer conference to go to.

StackOverflow DevDays

This is more of a general developer conference, not just iPhone developers. The beauty of this conference is that it’s in multiple locations and dates and it only costs $99. Plus you get to hang out with Joel Spolsky.