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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.