Chris Stevens’s book Appillionaires chronicles the explosive growth of Apple’s App Store and dives into the background behind popular, successful apps like Angry Birds and Doodle Jump. The book doesn’t cover the Android app landscape at all, nor does it cover any of the other application stores (e.g. Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace or the Mac App Store). And since it focuses on popular apps, it only primarily covers indie game developers who have struck it rich, not on applications like productivity office suites or medical apps. However, it’s a great glimpse into this cutthroat industry.

At first, I was skeptical of whether such devices would even occupy the PDA niche, let alone carve its own niche. An article from eWeek seems to think so, though it lightly sketches over the details of how physicians and nurses can use the Origami. They quote a UCSF MD-Ph.D: “I do think there's a lot of interest by physicians and nurses for ultraportable PCs, especially for physicians who split their time between inpatient and outpatient settings and need something that can travel in and out of the hospitals and offices with them.” read more→

The Missing Sync is a great piece of software for synchronizing Palm devices to the Mac. In fact, it's the only decent software for Mac synchronization. However, its interface is clumsy through excessive display of information that is either redundant or useless for the user's needs. For our case study, let's take a look at the synchronization progress bar. read more→