Linkbait 23

This week’s normal news.

I don’t link to any articles about Steve Jobs’s resignation; nothing will change in the short run for Apple, and therefore the mobile market will not change, either. The Android situation and webOS’s future remain the most important questions in mobility for now.

Your donation for keeping this series up and running would be much appreciated.

This US court decision could open the door to rejecting many software patents, bringing back sanity in the hysterics. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t really understand all of this, but it seems cautious optimism is warranted.

The demise of the low-level programmer. Written from a C/C++ point of view, but most of the points made here also go for JavaScript.

They don’t seem to grasp that one must understand the native environment you’re working in before going ahead and writing a program to run within it.

Amen.

Again an iPhone Nano report; the strongest so far. And don’t believe for a moment that the sources talked to the press without Apple’s approval. The Nano’s coming, and it’s likely to be huge.

Luke Wroblewksi gathers the stats on the tablet market, and they’re impressive.

In which it is proven that Steve Ballmer is sometimes right: Android is not free.

The Economist feels

the mobile-device industry will bear a closer resemblance to its other parent: the market for old-fashioned, voice-only handsets.

No consolidation, since many wealthy companies will want to buy their way into the mobile market. Still, that is liable to be expensive and difficult; see also HP.

Operator billing is coming to Android devices on Vodafone’s European network. Still, it’s not clear exactly how it’s going to work. (Typical Vodafone.)

Useful overview: who is suing whom in the mobile patent wars?

Dan Cederholm on responsive design. He makes an important point:

For existing sites (particularly ones that are also businesses) teams don’t always have the luxury of tossing everything aside and building anew.

[...]

I decided the best thing to do was compromise for now. Let’s keep the same content and code [...], and then let’s do something adaptive to it—using media queries to effectively make the site fluid and as vertical as possible when rendered at 480px wide and smaller. In other words, let’s take a step towards a responsive design by crafting an adaptive stylesheet that overrides the master to make things usable and readable on phones and small-screened things. Our tiny team can continue to maintain just one codebase.

Excellent advice for if you don’t have the resources to recreate a site from scratch.

LinkedIn’s HTML5 app is a disappointment: basically it works nowhere but on the latest iPhone and Android.

So it looks like LinkedIn has built a webapp that only works with a subset of devices that can also run the LinkedIn Android and iOS native apps. That doesn't seem to add much value or to be the best use of the web, which with a bit of effort has the potential to work with all browsers.

Pity. LinkedIn didn’t get it.

Nielsen now tracks Android users, and finds that they spend two-thirds of their time with apps, and one-third on the web.

Overview of affordable smartphones for Africa. Now if Google would give away cheap Motorola devices ...

The South Korean government is going to help develop a new OS that will help the country’s smartphone makers (Samsung and LG) to stend up to the American ones. Good fucking luck. Governments and software projects don’t mix.
However, the fact that Samsung enters the consortium is important. It shows it isn’t happy with Android any more.

Shaun Inman writes a nice little treatise on touch.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that onscreen buttons are not the way forward. Overlays are a poor substitute for a physical d-pad or buttons; it’s too easy for fingers to drift while attention is focused elsewhere onscreen or to obstruct immediate threats to the player resulting in unfair deaths.

Interesting.

How Browsers Work. As it says. Parsing, rendering, layout, painting, and more.

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Written on 26 August 2011
Categorized in Linkbait
Previous entry: Twelve steps for saving webOS
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This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, web developer, consultant, and trainer. You can also follow him on Twitter or Mastodon.
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