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Would you like to build one mobile web application that works on iPad and Kindle Fire as well as iPhone and Android smartphones? This introductory guide to jQuery Mobile shows you how. Through a series of hands-on exercises, you’ll learn the best ways to use this framework’s many interface components to build customizable, multiplatform apps. You don’t need any programming skills or previous experience with jQuery to get started.

By the time you finish this book, you’ll know how to create responsive, Ajax-based interfaces that work on a variety of smartphones and tablets, using jQuery Mobile and semantic HTML5 code.

• Understand how jQuery Mobile works with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
• Work with UI components to format content and create forms, lists, navbars, and buttons
• Create dynamic content with JavaScript, Ajax, and the jQuery core framework
• Customize your entire user interface with themes and CSS3
• Enable users to install your app from the browser and work with it offline
• Distribute through app stores by packaging your creation as a native app

Gain hands-on experience with the amazing PhoneGap library, using the practical recipes in this handy guide. With these solutions, you can enable your mobile web apps to interact with device-specific features such as the accelerometer, GPS, camera, and address book. Learn how to use your knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build full mobile apps for iOS, Android, and several other platforms without rewriting apps in the native platform language. Each recipe includes sample code you can use in your project right away, as well as a discussion of why the solution works.

• Add functionality that’s available only on a certain device or platform
• Retrieve the device’s current GPS location and place a marker on a map
• Create and save a new contact or edit an existing contact in the address book
• Take pictures with the camera or select one of the user’s existing photos
• Upload a file from the local device to an external server
• Allow the device to record audio or video through your app
• Enable your application to save files locally

What do Foursquare, Zynga, Nike+, and Groupon have in common? These and many other brands use gamification to deliver a sticky, viral, and engaging experience to their customers. This book provides the design strategy and tactics you need to integrate game mechanics into any kind of consumer-facing website or mobile app. Learn how to use core game concepts, design patterns, and meaningful code samples to a create fun and captivating social environment.

Whether you're an executive, developer, producer, or product specialist, Gamification by Design will show you how game mechanics can help you build customer loyalty.

• Discover the motivational framework game designers use to segment and engage consumers
• Understand core game mechanics such as points, badges, levels, challenges, and leaderboards
• Engage your consumers with reward structures, positive reinforcement, and feedback loops
• Combine game mechanics with social interaction for activities such as collecting, gifting, heroism, and status
• Dive into case studies on Nike and Yahoo!, and analyze interactions at Google, Facebook, and Zynga
• Get the architecture and code to gamify a basic consumer site, and learn how to use mainstream gamification APIs from Badgeville

"Turning applications into games is a huge trend. This book does a great job of identifying the core lasting principals you need to inspire your users to visit again and again."
—Adam Loving
Freelance Social Game Developer and founder of Twibes Twitter Groups

When you’re under pressure to produce a well designed, easy-to-navigate mobile app, there’s no time to reinvent the wheel. This concise book provides a handy reference to 70 mobile app design patterns, illustrated by more than 400 screenshots from current iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian apps.

User experience professional Theresa Neil (Designing Web Interfaces) walks you through design patterns in 10 separate categories, including anti-patterns. Whether you’re designing a simple iPhone application or one that’s meant to work for every popular mobile OS on the market, these patterns provide solutions to common design challenges. This print edition is in full color.

Pattern categories include:

• Navigation: get patterns for primary and secondary navigation
• Forms: break the industry-wide habits of bad form design
• Tables and lists: display only the most important information
• Search, sort, and filter: make these functions easy to use
• Tools: create the illusion of direct interaction
• Charts: learn best practices for basic chart design
• Invitations: invite users to get started and discover features



• Help: integrate help pages into a smaller form factor

"It’s a super handy catalog that I can flip to for ideas."

—Bill Scott, Senior Director of Web Development at PayPal

"Looks fantastic."

—Erin Malone, Partner at Tangible UX

"Just a quick thanks to express my sheer gratitude for this pub, it has been a guide for me reworking a design for an app already in production!"

—Agatha June, UX designer

• Learn the building blocks for building applications on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone
• Discover how the Mono tools interact with iOS and Android
• Use several techniques and patterns for maximizing non-UI code reuse
• Determine how much functionality can go into the shared business logic layer
• Connect to external resources with .NET's rich networking stack
• Read and write data using each platform's filesystem and local database
• Create apps to explore the platforms' location and mapping capabilities

Google's Android is shaking up the mobile market in a big way. With Android, you can write programs that run on any compatible cell phone or tablet in the world. It's a mobile platform you can't afford not to learn, and this book gets you started. Hello, Android has been updated to Android 2.3.3, with revised code throughout to reflect this updated version. That means that the book is now up-to-date for tablets such as the Kindle Fire. All examples were tested for forwards and backwards compatibility on a variety of devices and versions of Android from 1.5 to 4.0. (Note: the Kindle Fire does not support home screen widgets or wallpaper, so those samples couldn't be tested on the Fire.)

Android is an operating system for mobile phones and tablets. It's inside millions of cell phones and other devices, including the hugely popular Amazon Kindle Fire, making Android the foremost platform for mobile application developers. That could be your own program running on all those devices.

Within minutes, Hello, Android will get you started creating your first working application: Android's version of "Hello, World." From there, you'll build up a more substantial example: an Android Sudoku game. By gradually adding features to the game, you'll learn the basics of Android programming. You'll also see how to build in audio and video support, add graphics using 2D and 3D OpenGL, network with web pages and web services, and store data with SQLite. You'll also learn how to publish your applications to the Android Market.

The #1 book for learning Android is now in its third edition. Every page and example was reviewed and updated for compatibility with the latest versions. Freshly added material covers installing applications to the SD card, supporting multi-touch, and creating live wallpaper. You'll also find plenty of real-world advice on how to support all major Android versions in use today.

If you'd rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you.

Mobile web usage is exploding. Soon, more web browsing will take place on phones and tablets than PCs. Your business needs a mobile strategy, but where do you start? Head First Mobile Web shows how to use the web tech- nology you’re already familiar with to make sites and apps that work on any device of any size. Put your JavaScript, CSS media query, and HTML5 skills to work, and then optimize your site to perform its best in the demanding mobile market. Along the way, you’ll discover how to adapt your business strategy to target specific devices.

• Navigate the increasingly complex mobile landscape
• Take both technical and strategic approaches to mobile web design
• Use the latest development techniques—including Responsive Web Design and server-side device detection with WURFL
• Learn quickly through images, puzzles, stories, and quizzes

We think your time is too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Mobile Web uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.