Linkbait 26
This week’s. Nothing about Amazon Silk (I already talked about that), and nothing about Tizen (I’m still studying it).
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- At last the Android team admits the obvious: in order to work around the screen size differences on the hundreds of Android phones you have to think like a web developer. Although a web developer would puke on the ugly XML configuration junk. Still, it’s a start.
- Andy Budds gets annoyed with people who don’t understand the conference world. Andy gives a financial example that shows that $1,000 tickets for a conference does not mean that the organiser will have fat profit margins.
- And Andy talks about people wanting to be web-famous but expecting to get their fame without actually working for it. And working hard for it. Besides, apart from the fame there’s little reward. If you want to become rich you should choose another line of work.
- You know what drains the battery of your phone? Wifi. The Unvirsity of Michigan may have found a solution.
- GigaOm correctly points out that the Brew OS for mobile devices is also still in existence, although it wonders what’s going to happen with it.
- About infights between network people and IT people within the operators, and how that impacts their services (or lack of the same).
- Lea Verou explains how to properly report browser bugs.
- Nowadays, many enterprises support consumer phones for their employees. Previously, they supported only one OS: BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows Mobile. So supporting all kinds of phones is very bad news for RIM, whose mainstay is selling phones to companies who don’t give their employees any choice.
- Jeremy ponders server-side mobile browser detection: useful tool or spawn of Satan?
- GigaOM notes that in-app purchases are becoming quite popular. In other words: people want to pay for content. If you’d offer the app for free and let users pay for the content, you’d make more money than by selling the app itself.
- Alex Russell feels W3C should divest itself of a lot of fluff such as XML and Java, and concentrate only on actual web technologies. That would be a great idea, but it’s probably politically impossible. W3C members have already invested too much in the fluff, and won’t like them being spun off. Still, I support the basic idea.
Alex adds some thoughts about how such a break-up should look like.
- How will touch input work in IE10 on Windows 8 devices? Microsoft explains. I’m not sure they’re doing the right thing by equating mouse and touch: they’re not the same and never will be. And they use some homemade events instead of the de-facto standard touchstart/move/end.
- Steve Souders on making a mobile connection.
- A mobile framework comparison chart. Useful, though the very fact that we need such a chart says enough about the current chaotic state of mobile frameworks.
- Device vendors sign an NFC agreement for the US, so that their implementations match a joint standard. A good idea in principle, but expect political infighting.
- The Nokia N9, which runs MeeGo, is now available. But where? Nokia isn’t saying.
- And Nokia unveils the Meltemi project which will combine S40 and Qt to bring a touch-based interface to feature phones. (Which to me means they’re not really feature phones any more. The definition of smartphone needs to be changed, certainly when you leave out S40, which sells about as much devices as all smartphone platforms put together.)
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