Pro Tune Planet Waves App

As we become more and more reliant on machines for our day to day exhistance the musician is becoming increasingly reliant on electric tuners to save the day. This has become a reality for me that I know accept. No one tunes by ear any more and so I find myself helpless without a tuner to find a perfect D. Planet waves combines a bunch of great tools including chord charts, tuners and a metronome.

The tuners accurate, it has a huge library of chords, chord finder feature, scales, and an excellent metronome. The only drawback was that the whole/half step detuning options under the tuner tool are not working at this point. For example, If I choose to detune a half step down it will still tune it to normal. I think it's a bug that they'll hopefully fix soon, 3G iPhone
Some suggestions: a custom save option under alternate tunings and a tool dock within each tool so you could change tools quickly without having to exit out to the main tool page would have given this my highest rating.

4 stars!

Killer iPhone App Development: PT 2

sdfsdfsdfs Engaging the user
While we’re on the subject of users, here’s another aspect of a compelling
application: direct manipulation and immediate feedback.
✓ Direct manipulation makes people feel more in control. On the desktop,
that meant a keyboard and mouse; on the iPhone, the Multi-Touch
interface serves the same purpose. In fact, using fingers gives a user a
more immediate sense of control; there’s no intermediary (such as a
mouse) between the user and the object on-screen. To make this effect
happen in your application, keep your on-screen objects visible while
the user manipulates them, for example.
✓ Immediate feedback keeps the users engaged. Great applications
respond to every user action with some visible feedback — such as
highlighting list items briefly when users tap them.
Because of the limitations imposed by using fingers, applications need to be
very forgiving. For example, although the iPhone doesn’t pester the user to
confirm every action, it also won’t let the user perform potentially destructive,
non-recoverable actions (such as deleting all contacts or restarting a
game) without asking, “Are you sure?” Your application should also allow the
user to easily stop a task that’s taking too long to complete.
Notice how the iPhone uses animation to provide feedback. (I especially
like the flipping transitions in the Weather Application when I touch the Info
button.) But keep it simple; excessive or pointless animation interferes with
the application flow, reduces performance, and can really annoy the user.
Why Develop iPhone Applications?
Because you can. Because it’s time. And because it’s fun. Developing my
iPhone applications has been the most fun I’ve had in many years (don’t tell
my wife!). Here’s what makes it so much fun (for me, anyway):
✓ iPhone apps are usually bite-sized — small enough to get your head
around. A single developer — or one with a partner and maybe some
graphics support — can do them. You don’t need a 20-person project
with endless procedures and processes and meetings to create something
valuable.
✓ The applications are crisp and clean, focusing on what the user wants
to do at a particular time and/or place. They’re simple but not simplistic.
This makes application design (and subsequent implementation)
much easier — and faster.
✓ The free iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) makes development
as easy as possible. I reveal its splendors to you throughout this book.

Killer iPhone App Development: PT 1

As with the Macintosh, users have a general sense of how applications work
on the iPhone. (The Windows OS has always been a bit less user-friendly, if
you ask a typical Mac user.) One of the early appeals of the Macintosh was
how similarly all the applications worked. So Apple (no fools they) carried
over this similarity into the iPhone as well. The resulting success story suggests
the following word to the wise. . . .
A compelling iPhone user experience usually requires familiar iPhone interface
components offering standard functionality, such as searching and navigating
hierarchical sets of data. Use the iPhone standard behavior, gestures,
and metaphors in standard ways. For example, users tap a button to make
a selection and flick or drag to scroll a long list. iPhone users understand
these gestures because the built-in applications utilize them consistently.
Fortunately, staying consistent is easy to do on the iPhone; the frameworks at
your disposal have that behavior built in. This is not to say that you should
never extend the interface, especially if you’re blazing new trails or creating
a new game. For example, if you are creating a roulette wheel for the iPhone,
why not use a circular gesture to spin the wheel, even if it isn’t a “standard”
gesture?
Making it obvious
Although simplicity is a definite design principle, great applications are also
easily understandable to the target user. If I’m designing a travel application,
it has to be simple enough for even an inexperienced traveler to use. But if I’m
designing an application for foreign-exchange trading, I don’t have to make it
simple enough for someone with no trading experience to understand.
✓ The main function of a good application is immediately apparent and
accessible to the users it’s intended for.
✓ The standard interface components also give cues to the users. Users
know, for example, to touch buttons and select items from table views
(as in the contact application).
✓ You can’t assume that users are so excited about your application that
they are willing to invest lots of time in figuring it out.
Early Macintosh developers were aware of these principles. They knew that
users expected that they could rip off the shrink-wrap, put a floppy disk in
the machine (these were really early Macintosh developers), and do at least
something productive immediately. The technology has changed since then;
user attitudes, by and large, haven’t.