Download : Professional Android 4 Application Development (Wrox Professional Guides) [Kindle Edition]

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The fast-growing popularity of Android smartphones and tablets creates a huge opportunities for developers. If you're an experienced developer, you can start creating robust mobile Android apps right away with this professional guide to Android 4 application development. Written by one of Google's lead Android developer advocates, this practical book walks you through a series of hands-on projects that illustrate the features of the Android SDK. That includes all the new APIs introduced in Android 3 and 4, including building for tablets, using the Action Bar, Wi-Fi Direct, NFC Beam, and more.

• Shows experienced developers how to create mobile applications for Android smartphones and tablets
• Revised and expanded to cover all the Android SDK releases including Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), including all updated APIs, and the latest changes to the Android platform.
• Explains new and enhanced features such as drag and drop, fragments, the action bar, enhanced multitouch support, new environmental sensor support, major improvements to the animation framework, and a range of new communications techniques including NFC and Wi-Fi direct.
• Provides practical guidance on publishing and marketing your applications, best practices for user experience, and more

This book helps you learn to master the design, lifecycle, and UI of an Android app through practical exercises, which you can then use as a basis for developing your own Android apps.

Sunday, November 11, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Download 100 Ways To Use Your Android Device (Learning a new skill every day) [Kindle Edition]

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Android will be powering not only your mobile devices, but in the near future, it will control your TV, Cars, general electrical equipments and even your whole home.
You can be in control of all those things and will be controlling them with your hand held device like a mobile or tablet. This book lists a hundred ways you can use your android device.

Here is a sample of what you will get.

Take measurement

You can now use your android device to take measurements of all sorts. Hard to believe? Take a look at the various apps which belong to this category. First of all there is an app called Smart Measure which measures the distance and height of an object by trigonometry. The effective distance in which it does the calculation is about 1-50 m. Just stand up and press the camera shutter button. The important thing to keep in mind is to aim the camera at the ground, not the object. Another app which belongs to a similar category is called the Smart Ruler. You can measure the length of small objects with your phone by touch. Put an object on the screen of your phone. Adjust the object to the left of the screen and touch the screen and read the length.

Sunday, November 11, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Download : Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age [Kindle Edition]

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Our discombobulated Internet Age could learn important new tricks from some very old thinkers, according to this incisive critique of online life and its discontents. Journalist Powers bemoans the reigning dogma of digital maximalism that requires us to divide our attention between ever more e-mails, text messages, cellphone calls, video streams, and blinking banners, resulting, he argues, in lowered productivity and a distracted life devoid of meaning and depth. 

In a nifty and refreshing turn, he looks to ideas of the past for remedies to this hyper-modern predicament: to Plato, who analyzed the transition from the ancient technology of talking to the cutting-edge gadgetry of written scrolls; to Shakespeare, who gave Hamlet the latest in Elizabethan information apps, an erasable notebook; to Thoreau, who carved out solitary spaces amid the press of telegraphs and railroads. 

The author sometimes lapses into mysticism—In solitude we meet not just ourselves but all other selves—and his solutions, like the weekend-long Internet Sabbaths he and his wife decreed for their family, are small-bore. But Powers deftly blends an appreciation of the advantages of information technology and a shrewd assessment of its pitfalls into a compelling call to disconnect.

Sunday, November 11, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Download : Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War [Kindle Edition]

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The center could not hold amid a flood of passionate intensity recorded in this illuminating study of the 1860 election campaign. Historian Egerton (Death or Liberty) chronicles the year's chaotic political wranglings, from the fractious party conventions that threw up four presidential contenders (two from minor parties) to the search for a congressional compromise to save the Union on the eve of Lincoln's inauguration. 

An energized antislavery Republican Party supported Lincoln, unwittingly aided by cagey Southern radicals William Yancey and Robert Rhett, who, Egerton argues, conspired to split their own Democratic party in order to guarantee Lincoln's victory and thus obtain a pretext for secession. In the doomed middle are Stephen Douglas and other moderates trying to preserve the nation with proslavery compromises that infuriated the North without appeasing the South. 

This is politics as high drama, and Egerton does it justice with his lucid, meticulous account of backroom deals, parliamentary brawling, and speeches whose rhetorical vitriol (one Republican convention speaker called Southerners the whole vassalage of hell ) presaged violence. Also fine is Egerton's analysis of the human motivations that tore the country apart.

Sunday, November 04, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

Download : Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science

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From Marie Curie to x-rays to the Manhattan Project, Radioactivity traces the history of atomic physics and its transformation from a fringe science into a field that seized the popular and political imagination with discovery after spectacular discovery. 

Marjorie C. Malley shows that the discovery of radioactivity had profound consequences besides The Bomb: it allowed women more opportunities to become scientists; it helped doctors treat cancer and diagnose battlefield wounds more effectively; it prompted scientists to reconsider some of the most fundamental rules of physics. And inevitably, it became yet another arena for political gamesmanship during the early 20th century. 

Like the Very Short Introductions series, Radioactivity is an efficient and straightforward guide to the history of a science whose endpoints are well-known, but whose growth and development have remained underappreciated for a long time.

Sunday, November 04, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More