Designing

With over 150,000 apps in the App Store, it has become increasingly challenging for app designers and developers to differentiate their apps. The days are long gone when it was possible to crank out an app over the weekend and refine it after receiving a few not so flattering user reviews. Users now have choices -- lots of them. If your app is difficult to use or doesn’t meet their needs, finding another one is just a tap away.

To illustrate, consider the ever-growing field of Twitter clients. There are hundreds of variations in the App Store but only a handful stand out from the pack (such as Tweetie or Twitterific). For most apps, it boils down to one thing: the user experience. The same is true for countless other categories within the App Store; well-designed apps are more likely to attract and retain users. Of course there are other critical aspects of iPhone app development: the coding, the marketing, the customer support. All of the elements must come together.

Designing the iPhone User Experience will help you tackle the user experience part of the iPhone challenge. Three key themes will be reinforced throughout the book: Know thy user, the Design Lifecycle, and Attention to Detail:

• Know Thy User
  Millions of people depend on iPhone apps to get them to work, find their next meal, and stay in touch with family and friends. Professionals of all kinds also rely on iPhone apps: doctors look up drug interactions; photographers fine-tune lighting; cyclists find the best routes. To truly understand how your apps can fit into their lives, designers and developers must learn how users do things today, what’s important to them, and what needs have not been met. Part II, Introduction to User Research, will introduce a variety of user research methods.
• The Design Lifecycle
  Award-winning designs rarely happen overnight; they usually only occur after many rigorous design cycles. To illustrate this point, consider USA TODAY's iPhone application, which went through at least seven iterations for the article view in their app. These kinds of iterations should happen before you launch your app, since it will save valuable time and money, not to mention the headaches a bad design could create for your user. More importantly, you may only have one chance to impress your users -- you do not want to sell them half-baked ideas. Part III, Developing your App Concept, will explain how to iteratively design and test your app concepts.
• Attention to Detail
  Most professionals know that attention to detail is important, but hundreds of apps fail to incorporate even the most basic design principles. This lack of attention is not merely an aesthetic issue (which is important) it also affects the way apps function. For example, a news article without proper alignment will be difficult to read, and a poorly rendered icon will be challenging to interpret. Apps with a razor sharp attention to detail will stand out because their apps will look good and perform well. Part IV, Refining your App Concept, will show you how to make to your app shine, from visual design and branding to accessibility and localization.

Mastering these three areas will help set your app apart from the crowd. You may not have an award-winning app over night. But knowing your users, iterative design, and attention to detail are important first steps.

Gain the knowledge and tools to deliver compelling mobile phone applications.

Mobile and wireless application design is complex and challenging. Selecting an application technology and designing a mobile application require an understanding of the benefits, costs, context, and restrictions of the development company, end user, target device, and industry structure.

Designing the Mobile User Experience provides the experienced product development professional with an understanding of the users, technologies, devices, design principles, techniques and industry players unique to the mobile and wireless space. Barbara Ballard describes the different components affecting the user experience and principles applicable to the mobile environment, enabling the reader to choose effective technologies, platforms, and devices, plan appropriate application features, apply pervasive design patterns, and choose and apply appropriate research techniques.

Designing the Mobile User Experience:

• Provides a comprehensive guide to the mobile user experience, offering guidance to help make appropriate product development and design decisions.
• Gives product development professionals the tools necessary to understand development in the mobile environment.
• Clarifies the components affecting the user experience and principles uniquely applicable to the mobile application field.
• Explores industry structure and power dynamics, providing insight into how mobile technologies and platforms become available on current and future phones.
• Provides user interface design patterns, design resources, and user research methods for mobile user interface design.
• Illustrates concepts with example photographs, explanatory tables and charts, and an example application.

Designing the Mobile User Experience is an invaluable resource for information architects, user experience planners and designers, interaction designers, human factors specialists, ergonomists, product marketing specialists, and brand managers. Managers and directors within organizations entering the mobile space, advanced students, partnership managers, software architects, solution architects, development managers, graphic designers, visual designers, and interface designers will also find this to be an excellent guide to the topic.

"The book addresses a sorely missing set of considerations in the real world... This is a very timely book."
-Peter Herzum, author of Business Component Factory and CEO of Herzum Software

XML is a tremendous enabler for platform agnostic data and metadata exchanges. However, there are no clear processes and techniques specifically focused on the engineering of XML structures to support reuse and integration simplicity, which are of particular importance in the age of application integration and Web services. This book describes the challenges of using XML in a manner that promotes simplification of integration, and a high degree of schema reuse. It also describes the syntactical capabilities of XML and XML Schemas, and the similarities (and in some cases limitations) of XML DTDs. This book presents combinations of architectural and design approaches to using XML as well as numerous syntactical and working examples.

* Designed to be read three different ways: skim the margin notes for quick information, or use tables in the appendix to locate sections relevant the to a particular issue, or read cover-to-cover for the in-depth treatment.
* Contains numerous tables that describe datatypes supported by the most common DBMSs and map to XML Schema supported data types.
* Unique focus on the value added role and processes of the data architect as they apply to enterprise use of XML.

Written by Sun Microsystems' Java™ BluePrints team, Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform is the authoritative guide to the best practices for designing and integrating enterprise-level Web services using the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4. This book provides the guidelines, patterns, and real-world examples architects and developers need in order to shorten the learning curve and start building robust, scalable, and portable solutions.

The authors use the Java Adventure Builder application to bring the design process to life and help illustrate the use of Java APIs for XML Processing (JAXP), Java APIs for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC), and other Web service and Java-XML technologies.

Key topic coverage includes:

Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform provides the insight, advice, and detail that make it easier to create effective Web service applications using the J2EE 1.4 platform.

An indispensable asset to all J2EE developers and should never be far from reach. Offers developers a simplified, component-based approach to creating applications for intranets and the Internet. Softcover.

Written by Sun Microsystems' Java™ BluePrints team, Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform is the authoritative guide to the best practices for designing and integrating enterprise-level Web services using the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4. This book provides the guidelines, patterns, and real-world examples architects and developers need in order to shorten the learning curve and start building robust, scalable, and portable solutions.

The authors use the Java Adventure Builder application to bring the design process to life and help illustrate the use of Java APIs for XML Processing (JAXP), Java APIs for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC), and other Web service and Java-XML technologies.

Key topic coverage includes:

Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform provides the insight, advice, and detail that make it easier to create effective Web service applications using the J2EE 1.4 platform.

Written by Sun Microsystems' Java™ BluePrints team, Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform is the authoritative guide to the best practices for designing and integrating enterprise-level Web services using the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.4. This book provides the guidelines, patterns, and real-world examples architects and developers need in order to shorten the learning curve and start building robust, scalable, and portable solutions.

The authors use the Java Adventure Builder application to bring the design process to life and help illustrate the use of Java APIs for XML Processing (JAXP), Java APIs for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC), and other Web service and Java-XML technologies.

Key topic coverage includes:

Designing Web Services with the J2EE™ 1.4 Platform provides the insight, advice, and detail that make it easier to create effective Web service applications using the J2EE 1.4 platform.

An indispensable asset to all J2EE developers and should never be far from reach. Offers developers a simplified, component-based approach to creating applications for intranets and the Internet. Softcover.

This book simplifies the creation of well-designed enterprise applications using Sun's newly upgraded Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 platform. Experienced Java mentors Gail and Paul Anderson use detailed code examples to introduce every key skill involved in creating EJB components, standalone Java clients, and JSP Web-based clients. They also show how to apply today's most powerful EJB design guidelines and patterns -- and how to avoid critical errors in EJB application design. Using real-world business components, the authors illustrate these and other key EJB features: stateless and stateful session beans, entity beans with bean-managed persistence, entity beans with container-managed persistence, container-managed relationships, local and remote interfaces, the EJB query language, and message-driven beans. Each chapter includes a "Design Guidelines and Patterns" section that helps developers understand the key tradeoffs associated with their design decisions.

Windows 2003 Server is unquestionably the dominant enterprise level operating system in the industry, with 95% of all companies running it. And for the last tow years, over 50% of all product upgrades have been security related. Securing Windows Server, according to bill gates, is the company's #1 priority.

While considering the security needs of your organiztion, you need to balance the human and the technical in order to create the best security design for your organization. Securing a Windows Server 2003 enterprise network is hardly a small undertaking, but it becomes quite manageable if you approach it in an organized and systematic way. This includes configuring software, services, and protocols to meet an organization's security needs.

* The Perfect Guide if "System Administrator is NOT your primary job function

* Avoid "time drains" configuring the many different security standards built into Windows 2003

* Secure VPN and Extranet Communications