iPhone Obsessed: Photo editing experiments with Apps
- ISBN13: 9780321771629
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Obsessed with the instant gratification of taking pictures with his iPhone, designer-photographer Dan Marcolina dedicated an entire year to a series of mobile image experiments. His amazing results and the post-processing steps on the iPhone to achie
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Sunny 8:05 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Sunny for My iPhone
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I had been using the basic features on my iPhone intuitively… flipping once in a while through the thin booklet and the PDF file that Apple provides as a user manual. After a month, I decided that to make the most out of my purchase I had to more proactively learn about all the features.
The presentation in this book is clean and stylish. It’s also very clear — THE INSTRUCTIONS are detailed and ACCOMPANIED BY SCREENSHOTS, which are LABELED WITH NUMBERS that correspond to each step. There’s no way to get lost.
It’s comprehensive. For instance, there’s a section on iTunes and iPod, which is especially useful for the complete novice who need step-by-step instructions about building playlists, finding podcasts, etc. (The Dummies book is limited in this area; there’s a separate “iPod & iTunes for Dummies” book.)
If you’re already familiar with certain features or there are some you’re not interested in learning about, the book is arranged in such a way that you can skip ahead or hop from one section to another. There’s an index, of course, but the Table of Contents is as helpful because the headings and subheadings are straightforward, instead of cutesy titles.
The only thing that the Dummies book has extra is a list of ten web resources at the end. They probably have more informational nuggets spread around, but I personally found it unencouraging to wade through all the text. In this book (My iPhone), every page has screenshots and you can see every step illustrated — it’s very visual.
I found a typo on page 94 (“Inlcude” for “Include”), and the iPhone seems to have added a few modifications to the map functions since it first came out. You can find out about those on page 81 of Apple’s PDF guide. No biggies. The traffic icon is no longer a car, and there’s an icon for finding your approximate location on the map you’re looking at.
Thumbs-up.
Kathleen 8:13 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Kathleen for My iPhone
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This book has 419 pages, including nine pages for chapter contents at the front and almost a full 12 pages of indexed items at the back. The soft cover is glossy and stiff with an attractive and colorful iPhone, bigger than life-size, on the cover.
The book uses high quality slick paper and bright colors to denote chapters in the contents section that correspond to page number tabs of the same color within that chapter appearing deeper in the book. This makes it easy to find what you want to know in the chapter list and jump right to it, visually.
Especially well done is the “>>>step-by-step” feature in almost every chapter relating to how to program your iPhone. These are against a sky-blue background with numbered instructions appearing in easy-to-read black type. Additionally, as you work your way down the numbered instructions, a red circled number corresponding to that instruction appears in the crisp iPhone screen shots so you can follow along, fully oriented. This is exceptional, clear and professional.
The book contains 12 chapters that cover everything from “Getting Started” through managing your phone calls, contacts, text messages and emails to some of iPhone’s unique features, such as listening to audio and watching video, connecting with the Internet and surfing the Web and taking and storing photos
Especially unique to the iPhone is the use of downloadable free or low-cost applications that allow your iPhone to do some pretty amazing things, like a voice Google search, or the Wall Street Journal mobile edition (allowing you to read this business newspaper for free, while their Web site charges a subscription fee), or the iTalk app that lets you record interviews and download them to your computer via wireless (just to name a few examples of the multitude of applications.)
Let’s take a look at that chapter on apps. It clearly lays out the two different ways to obtain them. One is by linking up to iTunes from your computer, selecting the app of your choice available in the Apps Store, placing it in your library and then selecting it for syncing with your iPhone when it is connected to your computer.
But the iPhone also has an App Store application, allowing you to select apps right from your iPhone connected to the Apps Store, and load and install them right to your iPhone. Both methods are clearly spelled out with easy instructions.
The chapter on how to use iPhone applications smartly has a section on maintaining them, and deleting the ones you end up not liking. The book offers some sage advice if it was an app you paid for. You can delete it from iPhone alone, leaving it on your iTunes for future use should updates improve it and you decided you once again want it on your iPhone. (The book clearly describes how you can allow updates to happen your apps, meaning at some point, and improvement might make you want that app on your iPhone again). If you follow the writer’s advice, you’ll never pay for that app again.
The book smartly advises readers not to use the iPhone direct connection to the App Store unless you do so via Wi-Fi or a 3G network. Using the more standard E cellular network will be too slow and frustrating, explain the writers. (Actually, I’ve tried it and it wasn’t so bad.)
There is an excellent chapter on iPhone’s GPS application, called Finding Your Way with Maps. Clear instructions walk you through fully utilizing it. You can easily find a route between two locations, and get walking, public transit or car route and street-by-street directions. I hadn’t used this default app (comes with the phone, not one you install on your own), and the directions in “My iPhone” made it easy to play with and recognize the amazing features in the GPS.
But here’s why I like this book even more. The writer is really looking out for consumers, manifested by his willingness to call out the inefficiencies or ineffectiveness of an iPhone feature. These sections are sprinkled throughout the text as the author found the need. They are easy to spot, with a rust-colored background, white type, and the heading “It’s not all good.”
In the GPS chapter, this consumer-oriented section pointed out that the iPhone Maps app doesn’t give directions audibly, meaning a driver could be in a real and dangerous fix if he’s trying to follow the route and directions on his iPhone while driving. In some states (Alaska!) this would be illegal.
Overall, the publishing quality of this book is very high. I found no copyediting errors or oversights. I was tripped up once by reading a back-cover blurb that talked about iPhone’s “visual voicemail.” I went right to the index and searched for those words, hoping I could skip to it and find out exactly what it was.
No dice. That particular enticing item isn’t listed in the index. I did find it as a subsection labeled Using Visual Voicemail under the Making Calls chapter in the contents section at the book front, so I wasn’t too delayed. I still think if the item deserved a back cover blurb, it probably deserved its own line in the index.
Overall, this is a high quality, top-notch overview of the iPhone. It’s sturdy for refreshing and referring to as your iPhone knowledge increases and you want to expand your effectiveness on the iPhone. I predict you’ll go back for refinements and tune-ups all the time.
One last suggestion: Since the applications for the iPhone are a growth industry into and of themselves, it might have been fun if this author listed Web sites where readers could find reviews of new apps. If the publisher maintained a companion Web site with the author’s recommendations on apps, even better! These items couldn’t be in the book, but an addendum Web site might be a flexible way to handle it.
Good job, overall.
Derek J. Matthews 8:14 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Derek J. Matthews for My iPhone
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This book was a great resource for me, as I am in the “considering” stage of purchasing an iPhone. The book is helpful in showing the iPhones possibilities, as well as providing useful tips to make the device’s use more accessible. In addition to using screen shots with numbered diagrams of each step, the author points out helpful “work-arounds” to some of iPhones shortcomings. Lastly, the author was responsive to iPhone questions I e-mailed him, which enhanced my experience of his work. Read this book if you are considering purchasing the item, or if you’ve just recently got your hands on one.
W. Yanez 9:08 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by W. Yanez for My iPhone
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My husband purchased the iPhone for my birthday. I am not a Techie, so I was challenged to learn by reading this book. I have successfully been able to configure my phone, email, and internet, etc… The directions were easy to understand and the pictures are priceless– very informative and step-by-step procedures are provided. I was able to follow the book and maximize the use of my iPhone. I highly recommend it.
Tami Brady 10:03 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Tami Brady for My iPhone
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My iPhone covers 3G, 3GS, and OS 3.1. This resource is designed as a detailed manual for those who already have an iPhone and need help setting up and tailoring the systems to their own needs. Essentially, it is the book that should have come with the box. More than this, however, I found that this book also provided important information that people should probably know before they purchase an iPhone.
There are plenty of points of note that potential iPhone users should know before deciding if iPhone is the best choice for them. On the positive side, iPhone’s touch screen, intuitive keyboard, and features such as being able to attach photos to text messages make the iPhone easy to use. On the potentially negative side, there are extra fees for Internet use and downloading iTunes.
Peter J. Neame 10:32 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Peter J. Neame for Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series)
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The “gold standard” for learning Cocoa programming has been Hillegass’s book Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) for a long time. However, it is slightly in need of revision. This book is a worthy supplement or even an alternate – the style is quite different, a bit more playful. Nutting, LaMarche and Mark have done a great job of explaining some of the whys and wherefores of doing things the cocoa way and have the advantage of working with Leopard and Snow Leopard. So this is a bit easier to follow and doesn’t run into the “xyz is deprecated” debugging notes (so much, there are still a few!). However, Hillegass is determined to make sure his students think, so his book has problems for the reader to solve, some of which are pretty challenging and have several solutions. This book takes a “here’s how you do it, why you do it this way and read the manual for anything else”. Different folks will have different views as to which book is better – I think that they complement each other quite well and are both well worth reading. I find I learn different things from the two books and regard them both equally.
The authors give a very thorough coverage of bindings and Core Data. I was not aware of the fact that you can drop a datamodel entity into Xcode to obtain most of the nuts and bolts of a fully functional application, completely automatically. This alone was worth the price of the book – a clear explanation for binding and methods for dealing with large datasets (not covered elsewhere, even in the excellent Cocoa Design Patterns. For the cocoa programmer, this almost puts Xcode up as a simple alternative to Filemaker, although the latter has a slew of built in features that would be hard work to implement directly in cocoa.
This is a strongly recommended book for the slightly above novice programmer (you do need to know the basics of C) wanting to jump-start learning cocoa to the fairly experienced programmer who needs a refresher on bindings and core data.
Staffan Nöteberg 11:19 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Staffan Nöteberg for Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series)
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Jack Nutting has played, worked and turned Cocoa (and it’s NeXTStep predecessor) inside out since the 80s. You can see that. He knows not only how but also why. And he shares that knowledge in this book.
Cocoa is a huge scope. An introductory book must select what is most important to learn first. This book does that. Furthermore, it is a great introduction to Conan O’Brien and Andy Richter…ehh, I mean Xcode and Interface Builder. The only thing that the book demands is that the reader has basic knowledge in Objective-C.
One of my principles as a writer is that more pictures and fewer words, doesn’t make it harder to grasp – quite the contrary. This book is richly illustrated with screen shots, and the language is both simple and efficient.
This is a book for those who finally want to start to implement a killer app for the Mac desktop.
Michael Pelz Sherman 11:46 am on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by Michael Pelz Sherman for Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series)
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When I worked with the author of “Learning Cocoa on the Mac”, Jack Nutting, at Integrity Solutions in St. Paul, Minnesota in the mid-90′s, I had the strong sense that we were part of a very special group of people, at a very interesting time in the software business. The NeXT computers and software we were using to develop applications for our customers were years – perhaps decades – ahead of their time, and we felt convinced that NeXTSTEP was poised to dominate the enterprise software industry. Thanks to the power of NeXTSTEP’s software frameworks, we were able to develop powerful, user-friendly, mission-critical software with astonishing speed and effectiveness. Furthermore, NeXT seemed to be taking the technology in a direction that would allow for much greater adoption, as it worked to develop versions of NeXTSTEP for SPARC and Intel processors.
Then came the World Wide Web, and the dot-com boom. Desktop applications gave way to Web-based applications, which made much more sense for big enterprise deployments as well as (of course) “consumer-facing” applications. For a while, NeXT’s WebObjects (now the framework that powers Apple’s iTunes Music Store and MobileMe web services) was the framework of choice for big enterprise software projects.
Then Apple bought NeXT, and Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. Jobs quickly realized (to his credit) that if Apple was going to survive and prosper, it needed to focus on the consumer market. Sun’s Java and Microsoft’s ASP quickly rushed in to fill the void as Apple abandoned its support for OpenStep and enterprise development. NeXT’s advanced technology became the foundation of Apple’s OS X, and the future of the platform became intimately linked with the success of Apple’s hardware.
Many NeXTSTEP developers simply accepted these changes and moved on to other platforms. A stalwart few however (like Jack) kept the faith and continued working with these awesome tools right through to the present day. Today, a growing number developers are being attracted to the Mac platform as Apple keeps turning out great products and increasing its user base. In recent years, the stunning success of the iPhone has given rise to a new generation of Objective-C developers creating great apps for the consumer market. This book is perfect for experienced developers wanting to develop software for the Mac, whether they be newcomers or NeXTSTEP old-timers returning to the fold.
It’s hard to fully appreciate the power, beauty, and simplicity of the Cocoa frameworks until one has spent some time working with its alternatives. In the Microsoft world, VisualC++ and .NET provide similar functionality, but with far less elegance and a much steeper learning curve. In Java, AWT and Swing have nothing like Interface Builder, and the various Java layout managers are notoriously complex and difficult to work with. And web-based technologies such as Flex and ExtJS are only now just starting to rival the Cocoa UI frameworks. On the back end, Apple’s CoreData framework, drawing on years of engineering done on its ancestor, NeXT’s Enterprise Objects Framework, is unsurpassed as an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool.
Happily, this book (unlike so many others in this category) doesn’t spend several chapters reviewing the history of computing back to the bronze age. Neither does Jack fill up several chapters extolling the virtues of Cocoa and its NeXTSTEP heritage. Instead he jumps right into the meaty stuff.
Jack’s writing style in this book strikes a perfect balance between entertainment and substance. There are abundant useful tips sprinkled throughout, introduced at just the right time. This is not intended as a reference book; it’s meant to be read from start to finish. Even if you already have some exposure to Cocoa or iPhone development, you will learn new things along the way.
Any book on a living, breathing technology like Cocoa is bound to be somewhat obsolete before it is published, and this book is no exception. Apple released Snow Leopard as this book was being written, so the author was challenged by having to deal with the significant changes from Leopard to Snow Leopard. In addition, while the book is primarily about writing desktop apps, it also attempts to document some of many important differences between the iPhone and desktop SDK’s, though it could perhaps go a bit further in this regard – for example, when introducing a major new class or concept, we aren’t always told whether it’s desktop-only.
Learning Cocoa on the Mac walks the reader step-by-step through the process of building several “real” (albeit somewhat whimsical) applications. It starts by building out the user interface (View), then moves into the Controller layer, and finally covers the Model layer via CoreData. Concepts such as Key-Value Coding are introduced in the context of these projects, which really helps them “stick”, as opposed to introducing them in an abstract way and hoping the reader will apply them later. This approach demonstrates good OO design principles and shows how the various parts of Cocoa map to the “holy trinity” of MVC.
While Learning Cocoa covers several of the “assistants” built into XCode, which can automate some aspects of programming, it also covers powerful high-level concepts such as Cocoa Bindings and the Responder chain in great detail. Whenever an automatic or otherwise seemingly “magical” technology is introduced, Jack always takes pains to explain what’s going on under the hood. This isn’t a book for entry-level programmers who just want to dip their toes into Cocoa; Jack gets you in deep with the technology, but always in a patient, clear, and thorough way. This book is destined to become a classic. I recommend it without hesitation.
EX600 12:21 pm on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by EX600 for Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series)
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I’m a big fan of Apress books as I find they offer very good value for money. I visit the Apress site on regular basis to check out upcoming titles on iPhone and Mac development. There was one book that was announced quite some months ago, but the release date kept slipping and slipping.
That book is called “Learn Cocoa on the Mac”.
First of all, I’d like to point out that this book does *not* cover iPhone development. This is about Cocoa and Mac applications. Of course, with Cocoa Touch being a subset of Cocoa, you will recognize design patterns that you use on the iPhone and of course topics like Core Data can be used in both Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
The chapters in this book are:
1. Must love Cocoa
2. Hello, World
3. Lights, Camera… Actions!
4. GUI Components
5. Using Table Views
6. Cocoa Bindings
7. Core Data Basics
8. Core Data Relationships
9. Search and Retrieve Core Data with Criteria
10. Windows and Menus and Sheets
11. Document-Based applications
12. Exceptions, signals, errors and debugging
13. Drawing in Cocoa
14. Advanced Drawing Topics
15. Working with files
16. Concurrency
17. Future paths
I’m not going to go through all the chapters in detail as the titles are clear enough.
You can see that the base of subjects is *very* wide and that is what makes this book a really great one. I find the explanations of the subjects and the samples really great. I felt really comfortable and got more confident going through this book, occasionally going through chapters very fast because of my knowledge of Cocoa Touch.
The nature of this book is really great. We all know that there are dedicated books on subjects such as Core Data and graphics. However, “Learn Cocoa on the Mac” does a great job of giving great introductions and clear explanations of what is going on. It goes deep enough into its subjects to make you understand what’s going on.
I love this book. I had great expectations of it and it didn’t disappoint. This goes easily in my personal top 3 of Cocoa books.
J. Matters 12:56 pm on October 31, 2010 Permalink
Review by J. Matters for Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series)
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Nutting, Mark, and LaMarche have created an amazing book for learning Cocoa and building solid, interesting applications for the Mac. I have worked with the Hillegass book extensively, but I really wish I had found this book first. The style is much better suited to the way I learn things.
The authors really understand how programmers think, and they present the major features of Cocoa in ways that encourage experimentation. When you finish a section, you really feel like you understand what is going on, because they go out of their way to explain the WHYs and HOWs behind the code, even mentioning what happens when you do things incorrectly.
When I learn a language, I like to learn about individual tasks, write code to deal with those tasks, play around with the methods I learned, and then move on to the next thing. This book provides a great set of tools that can be used for just that kind of experience. An absolute must-have for anyone trying to write software for the Mac platform.
One note: This book might present some difficulties for new coders. It’s essential that you understand basic programming logic and structures before diving into this. Because of its reliance on Objective-C, a firm grasp of Pointers is a must.