Updating the images for free books helps

If you own an iPad, then you likely have downloaded one or two (or dozens in my case) of free books through the iBooks Store. The way they present the books leaves a bit to be desired. your books are a basic color with the title and the author on them.

An easy way to make your free books look like you actually paid for them is to add cover art to your book. You do this by dragging the image of a cover a book from something like your browser right into your book. How do you do that you ask?

1. Open iTunes
2. Select your Books link from your library.
3. Right click on the book you want to change the cover for and click on Get Info.
4. Click on the Artwork tab on the top right of the resulting dialog box.
5. Search on Google from googles images link for something like “books cover [name of book here]” (ie, “books cover heart of darkness” to find all covers for the Heart of Darkness).
6. Once you find an image, you should be able to drag that image right into the big white box waiting for you in your Get Info dialog box.
7. Click the OK button to save your changes.
8. Rinse and Repeat.

It’s that simple it takes a minute or so per book, but it certainly worth it. Your library virtually pops of the shelf!

• Microsoft .NET
• C#
• SQL Server
• JavaScript
• AJAX
• HTML
• CSS

• Project feasability
• Requirements
• QA/Testing
• Documentation
• Custom Development

We help our clients understand exactly what their needs are. More importantly, we help them understand what their needs aren’t. We help our clients comprehend what it is they truly want and make sure that the requirements of the project meet the actual business goals of the company. All too often then what does not match up with the why.

For starters, you could want applications that were touch and screen orientation aware

That one fact is enough to make the new iPad truly shine. The iPad is aware that you are on a device that you will likely be holding in your hands. My Acer is smart enough to know when I change the orientation of the screen, and the windows re-orientate themselves automatically much the same way Windows will rotate your screen display 90 degrees via your display properties. The problem is that is all the Windows laptop does. IF you wrote a Windows application that was screen portrait/landscape aware, you could render the application differently. It is just that there are so few Windows computers out there that you would not have anyone to really write the application for, plus you would still be running Windows. Windows was truly designed for a mouse and a keyboard. Touch is an add-on after all.

Background applications aren’t always needed, but would be nice

But people geeks will say they need to be able to run background applications and multiple applications at one time. The average person is not streaming Pandora and reading a book or surfing the Net at the same time. I do have to admit that I would like the ability to slot a couple of background applications in some special location on the iPad such that they will run until explicitly closed (I am a Geek after all). But I don’t need background services running from developers doing who knows what to my system. Those things can cause grief for the average user that just wants to surf/email/look at videos.

Total control is key

Developing a device and controlling the hardware and software really allows for unprecedented control and operability of the system. There is only one resolution of iPad. It has different storage amounts, but that is irrelevant to a developer for the most part. It is being able to design something that will look exactly on a user’s device as it does on the developer’s device. It allows the developer to take advantage of the exact hardware contained on the device. He/she doesn’t have to plan for an infinite combination of abilities. No reason to write code to allow the user to take a photo and upload it directly to facebook from the iPad. The iPad native version will likely have no mention of cameras, but will let you pick a photo for example.

140,000+ applications sure doesn’t hurt

With 140,000+ applications already in the pipeline and your ability to run the software you already bought on this new device is amazing. How many software companies have it setup where you can run the same application that you paid for once on as many devices as you own? Makes that $.99 app all the more of a value! It’s just too easy to find something you want to buy.

Application price points are low

Apple set the bar today for “big app” prices by only charging $9.99 for each of the products that make up what we know as iWork. That is an amazing value. No, they are not as functional as the real things, but they are specially adapted to the device. I wouldn’t say they are watered down versions though. They are optimized, and there is a difference. When you know that you have a closed market and millions of devices, the developers can certainly make it up in volume. With most applications costing less than $4.99, how can you complain?!?! I don’t hear the Electronic Arts of the world complaining yet. Where can you go online to find a comprehensive list of apps that you can get for your Windows tablet and actually purchase?

Ready to order

I’m ready to place my order. I don’t know whether or not to start off with the $499 16 GB version or jump in head first for the $829 64 GB/3G enabled version. I’m only considering the 3G version because it has GPS capabilities similar to the iPhone. Now to see if my GPS in my iPhone actually works without service. I’m willing to take the $130 one time hit for exact GPS/location aware ability. I think that is key these days. If not, the fact that I’m in one part of the city as my location will just have to do.

Time to start saving. At least they gave me 60 days to find the cash!

Here is a simple case and point. I have two cribbage games. I have one for the iPhone, and another for android. I picked cribbage, because there is not really anything sexy about cribbage…unless you play it on the iPhone.

Take a look at the two images. The android developer chose to use basic buttons of unequal width (please make them the same width!). The iPhone developer put a little extra effort into the main screen and provided graphical buttons. This is a key difference between android and iPhone applications. Apple would likely not allow an application into the store that had such a look as the one on android. There is nothing wrong with the android game once you get into the gameplay. It is rather nice actually. But the android application’s first impression is a weak one. Sometimes all you get is a first impression.

So to all the android developers out there, please make your applications look nicer to make your apps look on par with the iPhone. I do understand that you have limited storage space on the android phone to install apps. People complain if the application is over a few megabytes, and graphics take up space. Google promises to fix this in a future update. We’ll see if that helps android apps to have the luster and beauty I know they can have. How do I know? I’ve written apps on android where we gutted the default stylings of android to make it look really good. The only problem was the memory footprint the app then took up.

There aren’t much for rumors on the phone’s abilities though. Plenty of videos have surfaced showing just what the UI will look like. The new Android 2.1 ROM has already been ported to the Droid and runs much faster than the 2.0 that came on the device to begin with.

Everything about this phone says wow! But there is a big BUT coming. A trend I have noticed is a very fractured app store. Apps that run on one phone don’t seem to run on another. There are a lot of issues with trying to support an app on an operating system that has seen 6 major OS revisions in a little over a year (1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1). People are upset with developers because the app the developer wrote for 1.1, doesn’t work properly on 1.5, and the app written for 1.5 doesn’t work properly on 2.0. We can go on all day. Unfortunately, it isn’t always just the difference between OS’s. It can also be differences between phone manufacturers. An app may work great on one phone but not so well on another of the same OS version. I have a couple of widgets that seem to work one day and then not at all the next (on the same phone)!

So far, Apple has done a pretty decent job of keeping legacy hardware up-to-date at the time of a new OS update. It is not forced on the user, but it is easy to do during the sync process with iTunes. Google doesn’t have a PC counterpart to hook up to your phone. Average Android users have relied on over the air (OTA) updates from their carriers to get the latest version of the OS. iPhone users update their phones at their own discretion. A lot of this has to do with the fact that phones sold through the carriers are typically modified versions of the operating system. Certain features are disabled and controlled by the carrier. When an update to the OS happens, the carrier or the handset maker have to merge in the updates on their own. This can be slow and costly. It just isn’t a world the carriers play well in.

I worked on a project with one of the major US carriers where they were long down the road to creating a very impressive integrated UI for an android phone before version 1.1 of the OS had even come out. They weren’t even planning on releasing the modified version of the OS until 2010 on an undetermined phone. When I asked one of the designers if she knew what kind of a nightmare it would be to maintain that kind of a thing, she responded that it just didn’t matter. That is the mentality of the carriers. They tried to create a flagship phone at such an unbelievable expense to only have HTC come along and effectively deliver a better product with the Sense UI in far less time. Carriers should stay out of modifying smart phone core operating systems and just stick to add-on apps. Carriers move glacially…Google does not.

So along comes the Nexus One from Google. This will be a Google branded phone, so it should easily take updates to the OS when new updates are available. It will basically be like one of the developer phones that I use for android development. I look forward to seeing how those updates are going to be distributed to normal people with limited technical ability. I really want one of these things. We’ll see how well Google gets me going on January 5th. I may just not be able to resist. I do need a 2.1 phone for development purposes after all…