كثير من الآباء و الأمهات العرب يمتلكون هواتف ذكية أو أجهزة لوحية و يسمحون لأطفالهم باللعب عليها لبعض الوقت يومياً. هؤلاء الآباء تواجههم مشكلة إيجاد تطبيقات مفيدة و آمنة لأطفالهم فيبذل الأب و الأم الكثير من الوقت و الجهد في البحث عن تطبيقات مفيدة و مسلية لأبنائهم و مناسبة لثقافتنا و قيمنا كمجتمع عربي.

هناك حل لتلك المشكلة مع موقع تطبيقات للأطفال الذي يوفر الكثير من الوقت و الجهد على الآباء فالموقع يقوم بدور البحث عن التطبيقات المخصصة للأطفال في متاجر التطبيقات المختلفة كمتجر أبل و جوجل و ويندوز فون و يقوم بنشر هذه التطبيقات للآباء مع توضيح المرحلة العمرية المناسبة و لغة التطبيق و سعره مما يوفر على الآباء عناء البحث  في المتاجر المختلفة و مقارنة التطبيقات لانتقاء الأفضل و المناسب لأطفالهم. الموقع يعرض تطبيقات تعليمية و ترفيهية و ألعاب باللغة العربية أو الإنجلزية و إذا تابعته سيسعد طفلك كثيراً بالمحتوى المتجدد الذي ستجده متوافراً له باستمرار على موقع تطبيقات للأطفال.

كما أن هذا الموقع ينشر أيضاً عن العروض و التخفيضات على التطبيقات حتى يستفيد الآباء و يوفروا المال و ليس الوقت فقط :)

أنصح الآباء و الأمهات العرب بمتابعة هذا الموقع لما يحتويه من فائدة لهم و لأطفالهم.

يمكنك الضغط على هذا الرابط لزيارة موقع تطبيقات للأطفال

Today Ubuntu announced a new phone operating system. Ubuntu for Phones.

This is the introductory video by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, Canonical

Swiping and Gestures

Ubuntu for phones depends very much on swiping gestures. I know I know, all the new ones rely on the swiping features like Sailfish OS and BB10. Chapeau for Nokia's original Meego team for creating such great concept in Meego for Nokia N9 and N950.

Development Environment

The OS will support HTML5 development allowing web apps integration with the system and will also support native development. Currently the native development environment is based on QML for developing interfaces. QML has OpenGL ES support. Ubuntu managed to partner with big names like EA to release games that support this new OS.

What about the supported devices ?

The OS will support android kernel and android drivers, so if you have an android device it'll be most probably supported by the new OS. I hope that there will be some kind of support to Nokia N9. This guy deserves a lot after Nokia has left it alone.

Is it a good piece of news ?

I believe yes. The most beneficiaries in my opinion are mobile operators. Now operators have a strong competitor to android that will be completely open. Something with a strong ecosystem and with a huge pool of open source developers to support. Operators can now build mobile app stores for this OS and sell apps directly to users. If I was google, this wouldn't have been a good piece of news for me :) .. the second beneficiary is the user. Having a great open-source alternative to android will raise the competition bar. It's no longer a 3 Horse rase as Nokia describes it. Although laws of marketing tells us that at the end every race tends to be a 2 horse race.

How do you find this piece of news? Let me know your opinion in the comments. To find more info about ubuntu for phones click here.

OLPC initiative in Afghanistan, From OLPC website

I live in Egypt, which is considered one of the world's developing countries. We have  problems with education. We have a high percentage of illiteracy around 28% according to Wikipedia. I read years ago about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. It's a modest laptop for children that helps in revolutionising the educational sectors in developing countries.  It's a laptop that was targeted to be less than $100 and it's resistent to destructive behaviours like pouring water, falling on the floor, filling with dust. It's amazing. Watch this short video by David Pogue demoing the laptop back in 2007.

OLPC has developed a lot in the previous years, even the name became XO, and now they even announced a tablet under development. A tablet designed for kids and will be sold for less than $100. They promised that this tablet will see the light in 2012 and we hope to see it.

Simply this is amazing. But why didn't our governments adopt such great initiatives to improve education?! .. I believe they're paid to improve the country and make it better every single day but unfortunately I didn't touch this in the past few years.

I wish that someday we will have many geeks/developers/scientists from developing countries and I believe education, specially for kids, is the way to achieve this goal.

In your opinion, what does this laptop/tablet need to offer to be able to shift the education from its miserable state today to the state that we're dreaming of ? 

Have you ever dreamt of having an offline version of Wikipedia on your computer. If yes, then congratulations! .. It's possible. There's an application called Kiwix that will help you achieve this goal. Quoting from Wikipedia:

Kiwix is a free program used to view Wikipedia offline, meaning it does not use an Internet connection. This is done by reading the content of the project stored in a file of the ZIM format, which contains the compressed contents of articles. It is possible to read any Wikimedia project, although it was originally designed only for Wikipedia.

The software is designed for computers without Internet access, and in particular, schools in developing countries, where accessing the Internet is more difficult or costly. Kiwix has designed a version specifically for the organization SOS Children'swith this use in mind.

Kiwix uses the Mozilla framework and is available in more than 80 languages. It has full text search, tabbed navigation and possibility to export articles to PDF and HTML

You know, in my opinion wikipedia offline isn't a big deal cause the soul of wikipedia is based on being online, continuously editable and always up-to-date.

What do you think, is it useful or not ?

We all know that you can use Google's search box for mathematical calculations.

But today I googled "calculator" and here's the result

Cool, Isn't it :)

Share what else you discovered on google.

En Shaa Allah in this series I will summarise the knowledge I absorb from reading Josh Clark's book "Tapworthy iPhone Applications".
I will put each chapter knowledge and quotes in a single blog posts.


Starting with the introduction and Chapter 1, Here we go.

• "Design is what your app does, how it works, how it presents itself to your audience" 
• "If you don’t get it right in your first outing, most people won’t look back"
• "According to one survey, nearly half of all apps are downloaded based on a friend’s recommendation"
• "Loyal users spread the word, but few apps ever manage to create that big fan base"
• "careless ≠ dumb"
• "People don’t want dumb from your app; they want simplicity and ease"
• "Great apps don’t make us think—at least not about their interfaces. They embrace complicated tasks but shield us from all the complexity under the hood, making it effortless for us to glide through and accomplish our goals"
• "Simple is hard, and effortless takes lots of work. But those adjectives are the hall-marks of great design"
• "Your mission in designing the user experience is to make sure that every screen and every action delivers delight, efficiency, and results" 

And this was my output from the intro and Chapter 1

If U have read it before, or just read the points I listed before, your comments are surely welcomed.

This is a must-see Google IO session for all mobile apps developers and respectable mobile apps development companies (companies that don't suck)

session title: 

Don't just build a mobile app. Build a business

This is the website they built for the developers

http://www.guidetotheappgalaxy.com

and this is the link for google Analytics for mobile

http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics

Special thanks to my Friend @MamdouhAlShamy for telling me about this great session.

Good Luck with your apps business!

This is a cool presentation by Amir Khella

Are you a Developer, Designer, Software Architect, someone who draws blocks on paper ?
if Yes then Dia is for you. Dia is a diagram Maker and Editor. It's free and Open Source.
I recommend it, it is available for Linux and Windows. i think you can have it easily on Mac.
click this link to get Dia
If you tried it share your experience below via comments

Alsalam Alaykom 

here is the Ramadan Application i posted about before

You can download it from here

AhlanRamadan setup.rar