iPad Applications for Scientists: Survival Guide. Finding FREE and other applications for mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers (Mobi Manuals)

The iPad Applications for Scientists Survival Guide is a collection of 25 scientific applications, tested and highly recommended by the author. This guide will save you lots of time and money, by pointing you to the most useful, productive applications for scientists in many fields. Each application description contains: 

- Genre / Field
- Price
- Brief description
- Link to the application in iTunes
- Link to the free version, if available

In addition to the full application list, all of the applications are separately organized by genre. Some of the applications included:

- Numbers
- iAnnotate PDF
- Star Walk
- File Browser
- 3D Brain
- Graphing Calculator
- Printcentral
- Family Drug Guide
- MyNature Animal Tracks
- Muscle and Bone Study

Price: $0.99

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Designing for the iPad: Building Applications that Sell

Get in the game of developing successful apps for the iPad

Designing for the iPad presents unique challenges for developers and requires an entirely different mindset of elements to consider when creating apps. Written by a highly successful iPad software developer, this book teaches you how to think about the creation process differently when designing iPad apps and escorts you through the process of building applications that have the best chance for success. You'll learn how to take advantage of the iPad's exciting new features and tackle an array of new design challenges so that you can make your app look spectacular, work intuitively, and sell, sell, sell!

• Bestselling iPad app developer Chris Stevens shares insight and tips for creating a unique and sellable iPad app
• Walks you through sketching out an app, refining ideas, prototyping designs, organizing a collaborative project, and more
• Highlights new code frameworks and discusses interface design choices
• Offers insider advice on using the latest coding options to make your app a surefire success
• Details iPad design philosophies, the difference between industrial and retail apps, and ways to design for multiple screen orientations

Designing for the iPad escorts you through the steps of developing apps for the iPad, from pencil sketch all the way through to the iPad App Store.

From the Author: The Top Three Reasons Why iPad Apps Fail, and How You Can Succeed

Design Apps for Fingers

1. The App Wasn’t Really Designed for Fingers
   This is the number one reason why an iPad app will be laid out on the mortuary table. The iPad is operated by fingers, and human fingers are nothing like a mouse and pointer. If you want to ship half-a-million iPad apps, like Alice for the iPad, you must not design your touch interfaces like you design mouse interfaces. Don’t be a Photoshop jockey, get out there and physically test your app designs on the iPad hardware from the point you make your very first pencil sketch. Touch-screens have almost nothing in common with the desktop computer paradigm, but you wouldn’t know it judging by some of the monstrosities on the app store. The mouse and pointer interface that most of us grew up with is a system of “indirect manipulation” -- this means that the user’s hand operates a mouse, which then moves a pointer, which then presses a button, or moves a window etc. However, the iPad uses a system of direct manipulation -- your hand directly touches the object it’s interacting with.
   
   This small shift in interaction from indirect to direct-manipulation raises all kinds of issues for the designer. Now that objects can be manipulated directly, user’s hands can obscure parts of the scene. There is also the need for target areas with greater tolerance because the human finger is a podgy sausage of flesh, not a pixel-specific arrow. While the mouse pointer is pixel-specific, the human finger is amorphous. But this is not to say that the finger is any less powerful. In fact, with good interface design, the finger can be made infinitely more versatile than any mouse pointer. Sadly, many iPad designers have made the mistake of assuming that their knowledge of desktop computer user-interface design will apply to creating iPad apps. If you do this, you’ll end up making apps that aren’t really designed for touch. You can avoid the problem by testing and retesting your designs on actual iPad devices.
   
   
2. It Offers Too Many Options
   Don’t offer choices to your users; make decisions for them. There is a popular capitalist mythology that assumes that the more choices you offer a customer, the more they will enjoy their experience. This might be true when you pick toppings in an ice cream parlour, but in the world of iPad apps, too much choice will kill you. Psychologists have found that the more options you present a consumer with, the more time it takes them to make a decision. But you won’t just slow down your users by offering lots of settings and choices, you’ll create a state of doubt in their mind. For every option that is available, you sow in their minds the unsettling possibility that an alternative option was potentially a better choice. Settings and choices are also often an excuse for bad design. If you are tempted to provide an iPad user with an option, consider picking the best choice for them instead and removing the option. The iPad is no place for nested menus or multiple settings -- not only is screen real-estate limited, but you’re probably packing too much functionality into your app if you need lots of buttons and settings.
   
   
3. It’s Hard to Explain
   If you can’t explain your app idea less than ten words, then forget it, you’ve already lost. In the trench warfare of the app store only the clear and concise survive. The best iPad apps tend to do one task and do it well. If a customer cannot grasp the purpose of your app almost instantly, then it will spiral down the drain of the App Store, never to be seen again. Make it dangerously obvious what your app does, and shout about it. Before you write a single line of code or make a single sketch, have a long hard think about whether anyone will understand what it is you’re selling. You might have the greatest idea in the world on paper, but if the story of your app is not clear and compelling, nobody will share it and nobody will buy your app. Avoid this by discarding ideas that require a complex story to explain.
   
   Don’t sell features, sell the story of the features: how will people actually use your app? When Apple launched Facetime, they didn’t ramble on about the resolution of the video or the specifications of the VOIP technology behind it, they focused purely on family members calling each other and sharing news in a heartwarming fiesta of emotion. People in real situations make strong, easy-to-explain stories but spec sheets are meaningless to the majority of consumers. To win the iPad goldrush, you need to explain the emotional story to the majority of customers, don’t try and sell the technical story to spec sheet fetishists -- they’re a tiny market. The paradox is that to make an iPad app simple is actually very hard, but you can do it!

Price: $39.99

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Advanced iOS 4 Programming: Developing Mobile Applications for Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

With Advanced iOS 4 Programming, developers have the expert guidance they need to create amazing applications for Apple's iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Inside, veteran mobile developer Dr. Maher Ali begins with a foundation introduction to Objective C and Cocoa Touch programming, and then guides readers through building apps with Apple's iPhone SDK 4 – including coverage of the major categories of new APIs and building apps for the new Apple iPad.

This book concentrates on illustrating GUI concepts programmatically, allowing readers to fully appreciate the complete picture of iOS 4 development without relying on Interface Builder. In addition, Interface Builder is covered in several chapters.

Advanced iOS 4 Programming delves into more advanced topics going beyond the basics of iOS 4 development, providing comprehensive coverage that will help you get your apps to the App Store quicker.

Key features include:

• Objective-C programming language and runtime
• Interface Builder
• Building advanced mobile user interfaces
• Collections
• Cocoa Touch
• Core Animation and Quartz 2D
• Model-view-controller (MVC) designs
• Developing for the iPad
• Grand Central Dispatch
• Parsing XML documents using SAX, DOM, and TouchXML
• Working with the Map Kit API
• Remote and Local Push Notification
• Blocks (closures) in Objective-C
• Building advanced location-based applications
• Developing database applications using the SQLite engine
• GameKit framework

Price: $49.99

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Core Data for iOS: Developing Data-Driven Applications for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch

Today, virtually every non-trivial iPhone and iPad app must manage data—quickly, smoothly, reliably, and with minimal impact on the CPU to conserve battery life. Core Data, Apple’s ready-made data persistence layer, can help you achieve all these goals. In Core Data for iOS, two leading iOS developers teach you the entire Core Data framework from the ground up. Writing for intermediate-to-advanced iOS developers, Tim Isted and Tom Harrington thoroughly explain how Core Data is used on iOS devices, introduce each of its primary classes, and show how they interact to provide amazing functionality with minimal configuration. You’ll learn how to store, fetch, and validate data; provide it efficiently to views; and much more. Isted and Harrington first give you a firm grounding in the technology, and then present real-world examples. They present multiple sample projects, as well as a start-to-finish, chapter-length case study. Coverage includes

 

• Understanding Core Data’s features, classes, and interactions

• Using Core Data in MVC-based iOS app development

• Mapping relational data to object models, and building them with Xcode 4’s Data Modeler

• Working with managed objects and using UITableView to display them

• Creating predicates to match numbers, data, and objects

• Maintaining compatibility across versions of an app’s data model

• Tracking managed object contexts across view controllers

• Using Core Data’s automatic Undo functionality

• Integrating abstract entities, entity inheritance, and multiple view controllers into a complete app

• Optimizing for iOS devices’ tight memory limits

• Diagnosing and fixing common Core Data problems

 

Introducing Addison-Wesley’s new Core Frameworks Series, written for experienced iOS developers by world-class Mac and iOS developers, these are the first comprehensive, code-rich reference guides to Apple’s Core Frameworks.

 

Price: $39.99

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Head First iPhone and iPad Development: A Learner's Guide to Creating Objective-C Applications for the iPhone and iPad

Let's say you have a killer app idea for iPhone and iPad. Where do you begin? Head First iPhone and iPad Development will help you get your first application up and running in no time. You'll not only learn how to design for Apple's devices, you'll also master the iPhone SDK tools -- including Interface Builder, Xcode, and Objective-C programming principles -- to make your app stand out.

Whether you're a seasoned Mac developer who wants to jump into the App store, or someone with strong object-oriented programming skills but no Mac experience, this book is a complete learning experience for creating eye-catching, top-selling iPhone and iPad applications.

• Install the iPhone OS SDK and get started using Interface Builder and XCode
• Put Objective-C core concepts to work, including message passing, protocols, properties, and memory management
• Take advantage of iPhone OS patterns such as datasources and delegates
• Preview your applications in the Simulator
• Build more complicated interactions that utilize multiple views, data entry/editing, and rotation
• Work with the iPhone's camera, GPS, and accelerometer
• Optimize, test, and distribute your application

  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 iPhone and iPad Development has a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.

Price: $49.99

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iPad in the Enterprise: Developing and Deploying Business Applications

Discover how to plan, design, develop, and deploy iPad apps for the enterprise

Having taken the enterprise by storm, iPads are now in the hands of workers in virtually every level of companies in almost every industry, and users are beginning to demand line-of-business applications to help them be more productive and efficient from wherever they are. From business intelligence and executive dashboards to customer relationship management and order capture solutions, the iPad has incredible potential to leverage existing investments in information systems and enterprise applications. Even many paper-driven processes today, from sales presentations to survey data capture, can be dramatically enhanced through the introduction of the iPad.

This book is a guide for how business and IT must collaborate to develop a mobile strategy to properly take advantage of this transformative technology. Readers will also learn about the high-level software architectural options, the importance of design and user experience, application development tools and techniques, and best practices for deploying and managing iPads in the enterprise.

iPad in the Enterprise gets you started immediately planning, designing, developing, deploying, and managing iPad apps specifically for the enterprise.

Price: $44.99

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