Review of "Beginning iOS5 Application Development"

I was recently given the opportunity to review Wei Meng Lee's most recent edition of his beginning iOS programming series.  This book is entitled "Beginning iOS5 Application Development."  Admittedly, I know Wei Meng, so that may result in a little bit of bias.

As a developer targeting the iPhone and iOS, I have found Wei-Meng's books and knowledge helpful to me as I write applications, articles,and expand my own personal knowledge of iOS.  If you are anything but an expert developer in iOS, this is a good book that will help you develop and grow in iOS.  For example, I was looking for some animation examples recently and was able to easily understand Wei-Meng's examples and translate them into MonoTouch easily.

A little bit about this book:

If you want to develop apps for Apple's iPhone and iPad, first you need to know how to use the tools--iPhone's new iOS 5 operating system and SDK, and the new xCode toolset that come with it. This full-color book is the perfect starting point. Beginning developers, you'll get a solid introduction to the new xCode 4 and Objective-C and find everything you need to quickly build your first app. The book thoroughly covers all the new iOS 5 features, including new multitasking, location-based services, notification system, cloud-based features, and much more.

• Written by bestselling Wrox author, Wei-Meng Lee, this is an ideal book for beginning developers
• Helps eager developers quickly start building apps for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch
• Introduces iOS 5, xCode 4, Objective-C, and the basics you need to create your first Apple device app
• Covers a host of new iOS 5 capabilities, including new multitasking, new location-based services, and a new notification system
• Shows you how to work with iOS 5's cloud-based features for online storage of music, photos, and video

iOS Development with MonoTouch Cookbook

I was recently given the opportunity to review Dimitris' iOS Development with MonoTouch Cookbook. 

My first thought on the book was "do we need another book in this niche?".  I was the first to attack the niche with my book that came out in June, 2010.  Since then, Mike Bluestein's book has shipped.  Right after that Bryan Costanich's book shipped.  My book was based on iOS 3.  Mike and Bryan's books are based on iOS4.  After reading this book, the answer is yes.  There are two reasons for this:

• Dimitris' book covers iOS5 material.  I was glad to read through the section on page turning (the curl), which is an iOS5 feature.   There are also examples about twitter integration and other iOS5 features.
• The book has lots of little self contained examples.  I don't like books that try to build off of one example throughout the whole book, in fact, I HATE them.  There I said it.  If you have one example that builds through out your book, I just don't like it.  This book has lots of little examples.  I LOVE it that way.  These examples are just that, short examples where I can look for what I need, get the content, and bom, get on back with the larger problems I am trying to solve.  This is a danger when  only one author is involved, but thankfully, this issue did not occur in this book.

Bottom line, if you are looking to get into iPhone development and are a .NET developer, this is a good book.

Author Review and Production Editing are complete

What book editing isn't better the second time around?  Like a dog returns to his vomit and the fool to his folly, the author must return to his writing.  And with the past week, my author team and I have finished our AR and Production Editing for Wrox's "Professional Android with Mono for Android and .NET/C#." We are literally 8 months from being AR and PE complete the first time around (I really hope that there isn't a third). 

And with the upload to my editor at Wiley/Wrox, the book known as "Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#" is now Author Review Complete, barring any slip ups on my part.  Its always a great feeling to get these things done.  A real load off of my shoulders. 

The genesis of this book has been really interesting.  It started while we were still writing our "Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch" book.  We started talking about this due to the Apple self FUD starting last April, 2010.  Watching the number of Android devices sold go up each quarter also helped me make the decision to go forward.  Martin Bowling started as the lead author.  Unfortunately, he had family issues and had to drop off during the planning stages. The other authors that joined me on this were Nathan Blevins, Jon Dick, Chris Hardy, and John Croft.

Here is some info from the Amazon web site about our book: 

The wait is over! For the millions of .NET/C# developers who have been eagerly awaiting the book that will guide them through the white-hot field of Android application programming, this is the book. As the first guide to focus on Mono for Android, this must-have resource dives into writing applications against Mono with C# and compiling executables that run on the Android family of devices.

Putting the proven Wrox Professional format into practice, the authors provide you with the knowledge you need to become a successful Android application developer without having to learn another programming language. You'll explore screen controls, UI development, tables and layouts, and MonoDevelop as you become adept at developing Android applications with Mono for Android.

• Answers the demand for a detailed book on the extraordinarily popular field of Android application development
• Strengthens your existing skills of writing applications and shows you how to transfer your talents to building Android apps with Mono for Android and .NET/C#
• Dives into working with data, REST, SOAP, XML, and JSON
• Location, mapping, and the question of "where am I?" with regards to mobile.
• Discusses how to communicate with other applications, deploy apps, and even make money in the process

Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C# gets you up and running with Android app development today.

Please remember to buy 8 to 10 copies for the ones you love.  They will make great presents all year round. If you would like to start by pre-ordering 5, that would be great to.

HTML5 for Mobile Article on DevProConnections

My article on HTML5 for Mobile Devices at Dev Pro Connections Magazine has now been published.

HTML5 is the umbrella term for the next major evolution of markup, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for web applications. HTML5 is becoming an ever-more important mobile development technology -- especially in light of Adobe's recent announcement that it's ceasing development on Flash Player for mobile browsers and increasing its investments in HTML5. To bring you up to speed on this crucial aspect of development, DevProConnections has covered HTML5 extensively in recent months, including my article "HTML5 for the ASP.NET Developer." In this article, I intend to provide a similarly comprehensive overview of HTML5 with an emphasis on features oriented toward mobile development. We'll dive into some specific examples of HTML5 features and focus specifically on what is available with mobile devices. I will focus on what developers can do today as opposed to what is part of the specific set of standards. I'll also mention where a product may have a slightly different outcome than expected. 

I would also like to thank the people that helped me with the article.  There were many people that read through the article and provided suggestions.  Some of them were Dave Wardand Spike Xavier.  I'm sure that there are other folks that helped that I forgot to mention, hopefully, they are not too upset over that.  Thanks to Dev Pro Connections for the opportunity to write the article.  I hope that you find the article helpful as you get into mobile development.

Mapping and Location with Monotouch on DevProConnections web site

My article on Mapping and Location with MonoTouch is now out and available on the DevProConnections web site.  Here's the intro to the article:

Mobile phones are by definition, mobile. A couple of interesting questions that come up when users are mobile are, "What's around me for dinner?" and "Where can I get gasoline?" If you are a retailer or a company, you want to tell potential customers that there is a retail location near them. If you are a user, you might also be interested in learning about how to go from where you are to a specific address. In this article we'll look at these and associated features, so that we can provide them to users via mapping and location services to users in iOS apps. 

I hope the article is valuable to you as you learn about the iPhone, iPad, and MonoTouch.

My Artilcle on the UITableView with MonoTouch and the iPhone/iOS is now online

My article on the UITableView in the iPhone/iOS with MonoTouch is now available online. Hopefully it is of value to you. 

Article overview:

Data is what makes applications go. It could be a Twitter search, a running game score where you are playing against your friends, sales data, or any other type of data that users want to base decisions on. In this article, we're going to look at presenting tabular data to users in a UITableView. The UITableView has a number of visually attractive default styles that you can use. After we're done looking at these, we'll look at creating a custom UITableView layout. Along the journey, we'll look at some optimizations we can do that will give the user an improved experience. After we're done with this, we'll look at some strategies to get at various data sources, such as Representational State Transfer (REST), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), SQL Server, and the on-board SQLite database.

If you are wondering what MonoTouch is, check out http://xamarin.com/monotouch. It’s a great tool for .NET developers looking to get into iPhone development.

How do you get the Virtual Keyboard (aka Soft Keyboard) in the Android 4.0 Emulator?

Ok, getting the Android 4.0 emulator is not obvious.  In previous versions, I had set the "Keyboard Support" to yes.  I did that this time, and nothing.  I played with touch support, and no luck as well.  I finally had to beg to my Android contact for some help.  After much discussion, he pointed me towards turning off the "Keyboard Support" (aka setting the value to no).  Really?  Really?  Ok seriously, I'm glad that this is now working as I thought it should, and that the virtual keyboard support actually looks right in the Ice Cream Sandwich emulator.  But, this is also stupid.  This value is the exact opposite of previous settings.  While I am glad that this now works, the fact that the value is the exact opposite of previous settings is a hassle.