Transitions: The Nokia Way vs. The Microsoft Way: "Microsoft knows better than to osborne itself. The company has consistently stuck to its “Windows Everywhere” mantra and, no less consistently, has made sure that every new version of Windows offers strong backwards compatibility... For Microsoft, there is no Post-PC market". The more I see of the Microsoft/Nokia tie-up, the more interesting I think it could be. Go look at the VisionMobile report and look at the figures for device shipments and numbers of apps. iOS has the highest number of apps/device, WP7 is second, Android third. If Nokia can deliver volume shipments - and it's the thing they've been consistently good at - this'll be interesting.
What To Do When A Tech Giant Decides To Eat Your Lunch: "Platforms are channels not businesses. Don’t confuse the two. If you put all of your eggs into one platform shame on you, not them. If their business torpedoes you, you should have been diversified". I've not understood the beef some people have with companies that provide platforms at no cost. If it's commercially funded you're not paying for it, what right do you have to demand service - as a developer, or a user?
Thinking Outside The Browser Box: Why Should Apple Play By Current Internet Rules?: "Apple is not anti-Internet, they just believe that they can serve it to users better as a backend to their native apps rather than through a frontend in the Web browser". A few conversations have me personally more fired up about the Internet than the web. The web's starting to feel old, creaky to me. The forgiving parsers of human-readable markup and the duct-tape languages we used to bind and style them have accumulated cruft. It feels biological, a beautiful breathing wonder with vestigial organs, ripe for a fall from the top of the food chain.
How to Build Location-Based Apps That Don't Suck: "High latency and a lack of offline support in location-based mobile apps is a blight that must be cleansed". That offline use case keeps hanging around, and rightly so. The sooner we stop users from worrying about signal strength, the better.
Why mobile apps suck when you're mobile: "(another) reason to build a great offline / flaky mode for your app so that users aren't quite so frustrated by those spinners". Plus great reasons to understand more of the stack than an HTTP library: businesses that take responsibility the end-to-end experience produce products that are all the better for it.