Macadamian Blog

Handle Browser Differences on iPhone and iPad

Ah, browser inconsistencies. Every web developer's favourite topic, right?

We all remember what it was like supporting Internet Explorer 6, and 7, and 8, all for the same product. It was a nightmare! Weeks of wasted effort, all because what worked in one version of IE didn't work in another.

But we're past that now, aren't we? Every mobile browser supports HTML5 and CSS3. We should be safe with mobile Safari. Right?

Wrong.

Your First Android Release

Between the rush to “get something out on Android” and the expectation that mobile projects should be quick and easy, teams often do not invest in the upfront product planning required to make their first foray into Android a success. Read our new whitepaper aptly titled Your First Android Release - It Could Go Well (Or Really, Really Badly)

The Post-IE6 Paradigm Shift

Most web developers will tell you that they have hated Internet Explorer 6. There are plenty of reasons for this: It doesn't support standards, it's insecure, and it's really, really out of date. The web community has started campaign after campaign after campaign to convince users to upgrade to something better.

Finally, it looks like the tide has turned.

Nokia and Microsoft Join Forces!

My collegue Martin was right - Microsoft and Nokia did join forces, and Nokia placed it's bet on the Windows Phone 7 platform. The market reacted negatively to the news, and from what I've seen so have industry bloggers. The industry insiders praised the news and so do I. In my view, the marriage makes a lot of sense - this is no time to be maintaining your own OS. 

The smartphone market is maturing at a breakneck pace. One of the most foolhardy things you can do in a maturing market is focus your scarce energy and resources on building and maintaining an operating system. As smartphones become more mature and more mainstream (the industry predicts smartphone sales will over take PC sales in a couple of years, so I'd call that mainstream), smartphone vendors have to differentiate, and the operating system becomes a commodity. Operating systems are complex beasts that take huge teams of designers, developers, testers, product managers, and technical writers to maintain and release. 

Not long ago, server companies standardized on either Linux or Windows, and all but dumped development of AIX and HP-UX. The same is happening in the smartphone market - the industry is converging around a few key operating systems - iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7, so that the vendors can focus their energy on differentiating in ease-of-use, compelling design, market-specific features, and marketing. Windows Phone 7 is a great operating system that will only get better. This move will be great for Nokia. It was a brave move that will free up resources to innovate.

The Smartphone as a Distributed Computing Platform

A while ago, a friend of mine asked me about some mad-scientist research I have been doing on and off for the better part of a decade. It rekindled my interest in the project, and led me down a path of re-architecting my project to leverage the mobile network (more on that in a minute). In so doing, I realized that the though process I was going through to pick a Smartphone platform was probably similar to what every Smartphone developer goes through in trying to decide on which platform they were going to place their bets.