O'ReillyGMT - Tech News from 4 timezones either side of the Greenwich Meridian

Jonathan Ive on Mac Design

Chingford-born Apple designer Jonathan Ive on Mac Design and Unibody MacBook manufacture:

Via Leftsetz Letter

Write-up of November's iPhone and Smartphone Publisher and Developer MeetUp

November's iPhone and Smartphone Publisher and Developer Night was another triumph, an Augmented Reality Special. 24 was kitted out in its Christmas garb, and once again thanks to Yuza Mobile for loan of the space. An audience of about 100 people turned out to see two excellent presenters:

Ravi Damani is the co-Founder of acrossair. He talked about his most famous app, Nearest Tube, which uses geolocation to orient the user to the nearest underground station. The app uses the iPhone's native ability to know where it is, to know which way it is facing and to understand how it is being tilted. It calls for data from the Nearest Tube servers for the nearest station and for directions for how to get there, and superimposes the data it retrieves on top of the image from the camera. The app can then guide the user to the station, following the directions on the screen.

Mark Cummins spoke about PlinkArt, his Art Indentification app. Take a shot of a painting, and the app searches the PlinkArt database for images that match. Three seconds later, it returns the name of the painting, along with information about the artist.

Mark is a PHD student who specialised in image recognition, and the things he has learned are rolled into PlinkArt. The same algorithms would work on anything which has a hard surface - he said it wouldn't work on something like a handbag, which is bendable. With PlinkArt, all the hard work is done on the server, not within the phone, which allows Mark and his team to develop the same application for platforms other than the iPhone: it has been ported to Android, and other platforms are in development.

Both Ravi and Mark made the point that the sticking point with all these applications is accessing the datasets. As Tim O'Reilly says, Data is the Intel Inside of the next generation of applications.

www.flickr.com

iPhone & Smartphone Developers & Publishers Night - An Augmented Reality Special

The next iPhone & Smartphone Developers & Publishers Meetup is an Augmented Reality Special:

For our 16th November meetup we'll welcome Ravi Damani, the co-founder of Acrossair, the agency behind the smash-hit Nearest Tube augmented reality app.

If you're not sure what augmented reality is then prepare to be gobsmacked. The technology holds huge promise and Ravi will know better than anyone in the UK where it's heading next. Acrossair are also the brains behind other popular apps such as TVGuide.co.uk.

There are still places left, so if you're in London on the 16th November 2009 in the evening, come along. Promises to be good.

Venue
24:London
24 Kingly Street
W1B 5QB

Photos from Monday's iPhone Apps Developer & Publisher Meet-Up

The 5th iPhone and Smartphone Publisher and Developer Meet-Up took place on Monday the 28th September 2009.

Due to growing demand - 40 people at the first Meet-Up, 140 at the fifth - we switched venues from the Horse and Groom, which is close to being my favourite pub in London, to 24 on Kingly Street, which was kindly lent to us for the night by the good guys at Yuza Mobile. With its interactive walls and tables, it certainly looked the part as a venue for a high-tech meet-up.

Disco:24 has a concept like no other night-club in London and is without doubt the first fully interactive bar in the world. Created with bespoke tailoring in mind, you can hire your own area and surround yourself with your own personalised back-drop.

Chief Organiser Jason Dunne had just one speaker lined up, but this is living proof of quality, not quantity: Luke Johnson, the Chairman of Channel 4, gave a 15 minute pep talk for all the would-be entrepreneurs in the audience. The message was simple - give it a go. There is great satisfaction to be had in making your own decisions, in choosing your own path, and if a particular idea proves unsustainable, there are worse things than failing. The internet has brought a golden age for start-ups, offering a lower barrier to entry than there has ever been, with the added advantage that if you fail, chances are no one will notice. After the talk, I nattered to umpteen people, half of whom were setting out on their own using the iPhone or the Smartphone as their platform, and it was clear they were each rallied by Luke's words of encouragement.

I ran a competition to win Programming the iPhone User Experience, which was won by Ross Sleight, who had remembered from the very first iPhone Meet-Up that the bestselling computing book of 2008 was the iPhone App of iPhone Missing Manual. Ross, you're a marvel!

www.flickr.com

iWork '09: The Missing Manual - Josh Clark

9780596157586: iWork '09: The Missing Manual by Josh Clark - £30.99

With iWork '09, Apple's productivity applications have come of age. Unfortunately, their user guides are stuck in infancy. That's where iWork '09: The Missing Manual comes in. This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous.

Friendly and entertaining, iWork '09: The Missing Manual gives you crystal-clear and jargon-free explanations of iWork's capabilities, its advantages over similar programs -- and its limitations. You'll see these programs through an objective lens that shows you which features work well and which don't. With this book, you will:

• Produce stunning documents and cinema-quality digital presentations
• Take advantage of Mac OS X's advanced typography and graphics capabilities
• Learn how to use the collection of themes and templates included with iWork
• Get undocumented tips, tricks, and secrets for each program
• Integrate with other iLife programs to use photos, audio, and video clips

iPhone Hacks - David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, Damien Stolarz

9780596516642: iPhone Hacks by David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, Damien Stolarz - Prices: £26.99

With iPhone Hacks, you can make your iPhone do all you'd expect of a smartphone -- and more. Learn tips and techniques to unleash little-known features, find and create innovative applications for both the iPhone and iPod touch, and unshackle these devices to run everything from network utilities to video game emulators.

This book will teach you how to:

• Import your entire movie collection, sync with multiple computers, and save YouTube videos
• Remotely access your home network, audio, and video, and even control your desktop
• Develop native applications for the iPhone and iPod touch on Linux, Windows, or Mac
• Check email, receive MMS messages, use IRC, and record full-motion video
• Run any application in the iPhone's background, and mirror its display on a TV
• Make your iPhone emulate old-school video game platforms, and play classic console and arcade games
• Integrate your iPhone with your car stereo
• Build your own electronic bridges to connect keyboards, serial devices, and more to your iPhone without "jailbreaking"

iPhone Hacks explains how to set up your iPhone the way you want it, and helps you give it capabilities that will rival your desktop computer. This cunning little handbook is exactly what you need to make the most of your iPhone.

iPhone and Smartphone Developers and Publishers MeetUp

Last night (31st March 2009) was the first iPhone and Smartphone Developers and Publishers MeetUp in London. It was organised by my friend Jason Dunne, who recently left the publisher Wiley in order to make a play in the iPhone/Smartphone scene. I was nominally Jason's co-organiser, but Jason did all the work of booking the venue and lining up the speakers.

It was a fantastic evening, with a knowledgable, friendly, open, generous audience and two excellent speakers, venture capitalist Nic Brisbourne, and mobile games supremo John Chasey, President and Founder at Finblade and several other mobile start-ups. Jason kicked off the evening with a summary of where the spaces are in the iPhone apps market for publishers.

I buzzed around, chewing the fat and taking snaps, which can be found on the oreillygmt Flickr Photostream:

www.flickr.com

The next iPhone and Smartphone Developers and Publishers MeetUp will take place in early May - keep an eye on the Meetup page for details if you want to join in.

New Titles - The Art of Application Performance Testing, grep Pocket Reference, FileMaker Pro 10: The Missing Manual

9780596520663: The Art of Application Performance Testing by Ian Molyneaux - £26.99

The Art of Application Performance Testing provides a step-by-step approach to testing mission-critical applications for scalability and performance before they're deployed -- a critical topic to which other books devote, at most, one chapter. With it, you'll learn the complete life cycle of the testing process, along with best practices to help you plan, gain approval for, coordinate, and conduct performance tests on your applications.

9780596153601: grep Pocket Reference by John Bambenek, Agnieszka Klus - £9.99

grep Pocket Reference is the first guide devoted to grep, the powerful utility program that helps you locate content in any file on a Unix or Linux system. This pocket reference is ideal for system administrators, security professionals, developers, and others who want to learn more about grep and take new approaches with it. The book includes useful information not contained in the current grep documentation.

9780596154233: FileMaker Pro 10: The Missing Manual  by Susan Prosser, Geoff Coffey - £30.99

The FileMaker Pro 10 desktop database lets you do almost anything with the information you give it -- especially with this book as your guide. Clear, thorough, and accessible, FileMaker Pro 10: The Missing Manual helps you get in, build your database, and get the results you need, whether you're running a business, pursuing a hobby, or planning your retirement. It's the ideal guide for non-technical and experienced folks alike.

The Amazing iPhone at Old Broadcasting House - 23rd January 2009

The day after hosting Ignite UK North, nti at Old Broadcasting House hosts The Amazing iPhone, a one-day course for companies looking to use the iPhone platform as a business tool:

The Amazing iPhone comes to nti Leeds to offer a one-day focused training course delivering a grounding in the iPhone platform. This course covers:

iPhone Hype
Before iPhone: Mobile 1.0 and towards Open Mobile
The Stats - who’s using iPhone and where?
iPhone for enterprise
iPhone Web Apps and Native Apps
The App Store
Brands on iPhone
Who’s developing great apps?
Who’s making iPhone money?
A summary of the iPhone opportunity

This course is for business owners considering working with the iPhone platform, either by creating apps, or offering iPhone development services. Attendees need no programming or technical experience.


Your course tutor will be Social Mobile specialist and author of “The Amazing iPhone” report, Katie Lips, Director of Kisky Netmedia.

A second course is being held on the 9th March 2009, also at Old Broadcasting House.

iPhone UK: The Missing Manual - Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

O'Reilly are proud to announce the publication of two magnificent new titles:

iPhone UK: The Missing Manual is the first book to be published out of O'Reilly's UK office. It's written by David Pogue in conjunction with former Macworld editor David Fanning, and is an adaptation of Pogue's bestselling iPhone: The Missing Manual. Completely re-written with a specifically UK slant, it contains information for connecting to and making the most of the iPhone on the O2 network, the sole carrier in the UK: at the time of writing, this is the only book out there that covers O2, which should mean it dominates the market in the way the US equivalent has done. In full colour, gloriously laid out and selling at a very reasonable £12.99, iPhone UK: The Missing Manual will make the perfect stocking filler for the Brit with an iPhone.

David Pogue is a very prolific man: also out today is Pogue's latest bible on the Apple operating system, Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. Thoroughly comprehensive and beautifully written, this is the 'book that should have been in the box':

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition is the authoritative book for Mac users of all technical levels and experience. If you're new to the Mac, this book gives you a crystal-clear, jargon-free introduction to the Dock, the Mac OS X folder structure, and the Mail application. There are also mini-manuals on iLife applications such as iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto, and a tutorial for Safari, Mac's web browser.

You can buy either or both of these titles with a 40% discount via the UK Shopping Cart by using the code OR140.