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Best iPhone Apps
book

Best iPhone Apps

by Josh Clark
July 2009
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
239 pages
9h 12m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Best iPhone Apps

Foreword

My elementary school in Minneapolis had sensational student assemblies. It wasn’t the stock parade of Just Say No and Scared Straight folks, or the usual collection of career-day speakers. We got a swami. We got a Secret Service agent. I’m just saying: We had great assemblies. One of them, though, stuck with me more than the rest.

It was 1977. I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but he made music—electronic music, with big, heavy equipment. His gear filled the stage of our homely auditorium, and he sprang from machine to machine to make this weird music of blips and bleeps and eerie organ sounds. He knew how to warm up an under-10 crowd; Star Wars had arrived in theaters that spring, and he used his outrageously fancy equipment to boom R2-D2 sounds at us, all chirps and whistles. He owned us.

At the end, he stepped to the front of the stage. “One day,” he said, “all of you will be able to have a machine that does all this, makes music like this.” He pulled out his wallet and held it up. “And it will fit in your pocket.” I’ll never forget it: “It will fit in your pocket.” I was six years old, and it was the first time I really ached for a specific vision of the future. For me, the future wasn’t rocket cars. It wasn’t living on the moon. It wasn’t even R2-D2. The future was having my own little synthesizer, a computer in my pocket to make stuff.

And so I waited, for three decades, until the iPhone finally arrived in 2007. Apple’s fabulous device is the only thing that’s ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596806170Errata Page