Linkbait 28

This week’s.

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• David Storey gives an overview of the upcoming CSS4 selectors. Interesting stuff!
• Steve Souders speaks the definitive word on appcache: it is complicated and frequently produces an unexpected user experience.
• Jason Grigsby’s epic Responsive images series: part 1, part 2, part 3. Required reading.
• John Allsopp pushes back against the umpteenth attempt to make web developers forget less-than-optimal browsers.

  To reformulate the now famous question Steve Jobs asked of John Sculley:
  Do you want to make shiny products for the privileged for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?

  Feel free to restrict older browsers’ experience, but make sure your content works somewhat on them. Oh, and Opera Mini is not an old browser.
• Chris Heilmann gives a beautiful overview of the kind of math we need in order to make animations.
• Cool CSS border transitions.
• Andrea Giammarchi looks at Dart and finds it needs 17,259 lines of code to write “Hello World.” I’m on the verge of believing he made a mistake because smart Google people cannot be this stupid — can they?
• Zoe Gillenwater gives a useful overview of how to use media queries. Nothing spectacularly new, but a solid summing up of current best practices.
• Overviews of iOS 5 and Android 4 browser changes.
• Some more information about the Amazon Silk browser. Amazon has replied to privacy-related questions, and it turns out that it will not store https traffic, and that its logging is fairly light and will persist for only 30 days. That’s enough to do some anonymised data crunching, but not enough to make it a permanent danger.
  Unless Amazon is lying through its teeth, the privacy implications of Silk are moderate.
• Good overview of Meltemi, Nokia’s new OS that’s going to replace S40.
• Why doesn’t Windows Phone gain more traction? Part of the reason is incentives: many phone store clerks get a commission for selling certain phones, and apparently the Windows Phone commission is not enough (or non-existent). Horace Dediu explains.
• Android apps can be ported to the Amazon Kindle Fire. That’s important. There are quite a few restrictions, thlough, since Google Mobile Services is not supported on the Fire.
• Amazon to buy webOS? Frankly I don’t believe it. Sure, they’d love to have their own OS, but that’s even more important to traditional device vendors such as HTC or Sony Ericsson. Since it’s more important to them I expect the device vendors to bid higher.
• RIM unveils BlackBerry Tag, an easy way of sharing content from phone to phone. The list of shareable formats doesn’t mention apps, unfortunately, and I still think that will be a major feature of such a system. Still, this is a start.
• Android 4 incorporates something very similar, and here apps are part of the deal. Good for Google.
  Now if only Androids and BlackBerries could share stuff with each other. Not native apps, of course (though BB’s support for Android apps has interesting implications), but web apps, links, photos and such would be good candidates.
• Janne Jalkanen looks at NFC and finds it’s not as new as it’s cracked up to be. Besides, payments are not the killer app. Sure, mobile payments are useful, but it won’t make people spend more. (It especially won’t make people spend more on mobile apps.) Besides, mobile payments are only for the big boys — for now.

  But what makes NFC really interesting is it's potential for creative hackery. Every NFC phone can also talk to other NFC phones, and every NFC phone will also carry a card writer, not just a card reader - and these are accessible by all developers. For many applications, you don't need banking/military grade security. You could even develop money transfer applications - imagine e.g direct BitCoin transfers from phone to phone; untraceable virtual money transactions. There's a disruptive business model right there. Skype for money, anyone?

  That’s more like it.
  NFC is Bluetooth’s replacement and will serve to send basically anything from phone to phone. Cool!
• Sony wants to buy Ericsson out of Sony Ericsson (2nd story). This fits with the rumour that it was Sony, and not Sony Ericsson, that was interested in webOS.
• Still, Sony Ericsson had a decent third quarter. The plan is to drop everything but smartphones in the next twelve months. Of course, the question remains which OS these smartphones will run on. Right now it’s Android, and that will remain true for another six months, but after that it might be webOS or something else.
• Earlier I reported it was coming, and it’s here now: the Facebook SIM card. The user accesses Facebook via SMS and doesn’t even have to do anything. An unlimited Facebook-SMS plan is included.
  Now this is a mobile strategy to reach the next billion. Facebook leaves its competitors to eat its dust.
• Some more information about Facebook’s Project Spartan, which is HTML5-based. Also, Facebook releases a quite nice HTML5 resource. This once more proves that Facebook is one of the most innovative mobile companies, although it’s rarely praised for that.
• More companies start to understand the next billion: CNN released an S40 app. Not quite in the same league as the Facebook SIM card, but still a commendable effort.
• Ewan McLeod considers iCloud in the enterprise and concludes it’s not ready: there are too few ways for corporate IT departments to keep an overview and implement security.
  That might change, though. Apple always goes for the consumer market first. I don’t doubt somebody in Cupertino is considering iCloud adoption by the enterprise, and is drawing up plans.
• Interesting mobile micro-insurance system in Kenya.
• Cool. Shake this phone and it’ll switch networks for you.
• Network hopping on the iPhone 4S is not without problems.
• Huawei was caught in a string of lies (source in Dutch). It told European companies that it had succesfully cooperated with a whole list of big companies, but De Volkskrant found that about half of these companies never actually cooperated with Huawei.
• Overview of what’s new in Windows 8 memory management, which is important if Windows 8 is going to run on tablets.
  Say what you want, but Microsoft is serious about Windows 8/Metro tablets, and is consistently making the correct choices.
• Joe Hewitt muses about URLs, and how native apps use proprietary URL schemas, and how a community-maintained translation database could help here.
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