Pro Smartphone Cross-Platform Development: iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android Development and Distribution [Paperback]

Sarah Allen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430228687 | ISBN-13: 978-1430228684 | Publication Date: September 28, 2010 | Edition: 1

Mobile platform development is a dominating force, and a huge number of developers are focusing more of their time on creating applications for each of the major platforms - iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Android. With cross platform development architecture and tools, these applications can be built in such a way that a single code base can run on all platforms. The book covers architecture, development, and distribution of native and cross platform applications, and is one of the first resources available for developers interested in extending their applications across platforms.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sarah Allen is a serial innovator with a history of developing leading-edge products, such as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video, OpenLaszlo and Laszlo Webtop. She has a habit of recognizing great and timely ideas, finding herself amidst a talented team, and creating compelling software. She is now an independent consultant developing mobile and web applications.

Sarah has been developing commercial software since 1990. She began focusing on Internet software as an engineer on Macromedia's Shockwave team in 1995. She led the development of the Shockwave Multiuser Server, and later the Flash Media Server, introducing streaming video and multi-party communication in Flash Player 6. She has also developed software tools for multimedia, digital video, and graphic arts at Adobe, Aldus, and The Company of Science and Art (After Effects). She was named one of the top 25 women of the web by SF Wow (San Francisco Women of the Web) in 1998.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (September 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430228687
• ISBN-13: 978-1430228684
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #8 in Books > Computers & Technology > Microsoft > Mobile & Handheld Computing

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Rushed, Zero Depth, Not worth the cost., December 10, 2010

By 

LaPoubelle - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Smartphone Cross-Platform Development: iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android Development and Distribution (Paperback)

I bought this book because I was extremely impressed by the Apress iPhone books. This book is absolutely nothing like them. The layout of the book looks shoddy and rushed. The first page of one chapter appears to be from a wholly different book. Nothing about the presentation inspired much confidence in me.

Then comes the content. The book is short, only around 250 pages. Of this, the first 80 pages are simply a collection of Hello World examples for each platform. The sort of thing you could easily find on the internet with a little googling. The next section is the cross platform frameworks. Rhodes is given 50 pages of solid good coverage. Next comes PhoneGap which gets 20 pages of description. None of that 20 pages is particularly good. It amounts to little more than a brief survey of the material. The biggest disappointment is the Titanium Mobile chapter. It's seven pages long and tells you how to write hello world.

The rest of the book is a description of various JavaScript frameworks that target mobile devices.

This book is amazingly disappointing, and essentially worthless to me. I bought it to learn about cross platform development, and I got a collection of tutorials that I could probably have found with google. None of the code is very good or useful, and the presentation is terrible on top of that. If this book were about $10, it would be a worthwhile buy. $20 might be acceptable if you are also interested in mobile javascript frameworks. Right now Amazon is charging $50, which I would consider theft.

Read the back of the book, then use google to research all its topics. You'll get better material. The book really is that bad.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars neither fish nor fowl, December 16, 2010

By 

Dirk Dinger - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Smartphone Cross-Platform Development: iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android Development and Distribution (Paperback)

This book covers a broad range of topics and it has obviously meant a great effort to put all these examples together using so many different tools and devices.
It gives a good overview of native and cross-platform technologies availabe by the time of writing.
Because the book covers so many topics the single platform or framework can only be superficially covered.
If this is to be considered as strengh or weakness of the book depends on the readers expectations.
In my opinion the autors wanted too much. I am in doubt that a developer will ever have the time or resources or interest to try out all the platforms and frameworks mentioned.
An interested developer will always be using only single chapters of the book and will require additional documentation for his or her topic anyway.
So the book makes no sense for developers. For people that have to make framework decisions the book might be more interesting - but from
there point of view there a too many useless screenshots and no real decision memos. The autors avoid taking a clear stand and to give recommendations.