mLearnCon News and Updates

Mobile-optimized websites aren’t a new concept by any means. As long as there have been WAP browsers on dumbphones (like that first flip phone you thought was so high-tech back in the early 2000?s), many content providers have offered a customized experience for those devices.

With the arrival of more powerful (and sexier) devices like the iPhone and iPad, however, a new option started gaining popularity: mobile apps. Apps allowed publications like the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and even Canadian fixtures like The Globe and Mail to deliver richer, more interactive experiences to users on-the-go. Apple’s App Store helped make apps easy to find and purchase and later adding in-app subscription payments, creating a win-win-win situation for publishers.

But native apps do pose a slight problem. iPhone apps don’t run on Android or Blackberry phones, obviously. That means publishers have to launch several different versions of their mobile apps in order to reach all mobile users. There’s also the loss of profit to consider, with both Apple and Google skimming 30% off app sales [Apple has recently revisited their restrictive subscription rules - Ed].

So what’s a publisher to do? The Financial Times figured out the answer: build an HTML5-powered mobile web app instead.

Why? Because while differences in mobile operating systems make building one app for every phone financially unfeasible, just about every current smartphone or tablet offers an HTML5-compatible web browser. By building a web app that can adjust itself to a particular device’s display, a publisher can greatly simplify its mobile development process. Web developers have, after all, been able to build self-adjusting sites which respond to a user’s screen resolution for quite some time — so achieving this on a mobilized web app is a fairly simple task.

There’s also no need to sacrifice functionality.  Advances in web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3 let developers create web pages that look and act just like native apps. The Financial Times is a perfect example, offering a virtually identical experience to those offered by similar iOS or Android apps. And unlike previous mobile web experiences, HTML5 allows large amounts of data to be cached on a device’s internal storage thanks to a feature called localStorage. This gives publishers the ability to push good-quality images, sound bites, and even video embeds via mobile web apps the same way they can with native versions.

To read more go here to the Sync-Blog.com

The Financial Times has snubbed Apple and the App Store by launching a new mobile app that runs entirely out of a Web browser.

The timely launch comes just weeks before Apple begins retaining 30 percent of all revenue made by publishers who sell an app through Apple's App Store.

Built with HTML5 technology, the FT's new mobile Web site has been optimized for iPhone and iPad form factors, although other operating systems will get a similar experience through their own browsers.

"There isn't a single feature in the native app we haven't been able to replicate in the Web app," said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. "The developers [UK-based Assanka] did a fantastic job without the help of a manual."

Read more from the full article here.

Macworld - It’s true that you can use your iPad instead of your Mac to take care of many common computing tasks. But unless you’re ready to ditch Mac OS X entirely, you’ll still need to transfer files back and forth between your iPad and your Mac if you’re going to get work done.

Unfortunately, transferring and synchronizing files between the Mac and the tablet isn’t easy. There are several different ways to do it, but none are perfect, and each has its deficiencies. Frankly, this is one area where Apple could vastly improve the iPad experience. Until that happens, here are your choices when it comes to transferring files between your various devices.

iTunes

Apple’s officially endorsed route for file-transfers between iPad and Mac is via iTunes file-sharing. Unfortunately, it’s an amazingly clunky process.

For one thing, it only works with apps that support it. All of Apple’s iPad creation tools—Pages, Keynote, Numbers, GarageBand, and iMovie—use iTunes to move files back and forth. Some third-party apps—e-readers, text editors, and media creation tools—do too.

But even then, different apps use iTunes in different ways: Apple’s apps, for example, require you to select Save to iTunes when saving a document; other apps make their files available to iTunes automatically.

Worse, though, is the constant manual effort required to keep files in sync. By now, you probably know the routine: Connect your iPad directly to your Mac and open iTunes. Select your iPad in the iTunes source list and click on the Apps tab. Scroll down past the list of installed apps and look for the File Sharing section. Tap the app you want to copy a file from, so its files appear in the Documents pane. Drag one or more of those files to the Desktop (while holding down Option key) to copy them there, or use the Save To button to open a traditional save dialog. If you update a file on your Mac and want to send it back to the iPad, you must then drag that changed file back into iTunes, onto the correct app’s document list again.

It’s hardly elegant.

See other option from the full article here from ComputerWorld.

Ballmer announces that Bing will be default search and mapping tool on BlackBerry devices

Computerworld - Microsoft's investment in putting its Bing search and maps in BlackBerry mobile devices by the fall holiday season pits Research In Motion and Microsoft against Google in a massive scramble for mobile search customers.

Analysts speculated that Microsoft, which recently made a billion-dollar-plus investment in Nokia, is probably also paying RIM "boatloads" for the partnership deal, although Microsoft would not reveal any terms.

The announcement Tuesday that Microsoft is "going to invest uniquely in the BlackBerry platform" came from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a surprise keynote appearance at BlackBerry World in Orlando.

Immediately, several analysts noted the importance of the move, given the growth in smartphones and the use of mobile search in advertising and location-based purchasing.

The full article from ComputerWorld appears here

Amazon has formed a partnership with Overdrive allowing for Kindle users to borrow eBooks from libraries. The service should be available later this year.

Here’s more from eBookNewser: “The Kindle eBook format is basically the same as the old Mobipocket format. Kindle has a couple extra pieces of DRM [digital rights management], but other than that it functionally is the same … Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Overdrive first offered library eBooks in Mobipocket format 2006; the file format supported the idea of expiring eBooks long before.”

Will you check out library books on a Kindle?

*The original article appears here at GalleyCat