mLearnCon News and Updates

The jQuery Mobile team is happy to announce the release of Beta 1. We’re proud of the refinements we’ve made to make jQuery Mobile faster, extensible and more compatible over the last 12 weeks and look forward to having more frequent releases as we work up to 1.0 in late summer. We’re planning on releasing a second Beta in about a month that will begin decoupling our code so you can include only the components you need, add greater extensibility to support dynamic JS-driven sites, and bring even broader device support.

Note that jQuery Mobile 1.0 will require jQuery core 1.6 as a baseline. Going forward, we’ll be supporting the two latest major versions of core but we’re starting with a cleaner baseline for launch. Here is a summary of what’s new and improved in Beta 1.

Read more from JQueryMobile.com here

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

Question No. 1: Can you do it yourself?

For many small companies, apps are turning into a valuable marketing tool.

As more people come to rely on smartphones, entrepreneurs are cooking up mobile software that offers a quick way to connect with the business or learn more about it. The apps cover a bunch of jobs, from scheduling appointments and dishing out discounts to giving information about the company.

Take Danny Abrams, owner of Manhattan's Mermaid Inn restaurants. He was looking for a new way to educate and excite seafood lovers about oysters—a potentially confusing food with lots of different varieties. So, he launched Oysterpedia, an app that lets users learn the taste profiles of specific oysters, from beausoleil to bluepoint, and note the ones they've tried.

"I wanted [customers] to come into the Mermaid, and if there are oysters they're unfamiliar with they can learn," he says. "Or they can look back at the last time they were here to see their favorites."

The app has been a smash. It has more than 5,000 downloads, says Mr. Abrams, and he hasn't been able to measure the number of times people have used the software to share "I just had a bluepoint oyster at The Mermaid Inn" on Facebook and Twitter. He adds that diners have created a game—trying to eat their way through the app's database.

Read the full article here from the Wall Street Journal.

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.

Faced with one of the biggest challenges in its 43-year history, Intel is accelerating its efforts to produce chips for the mobile phones, tablets, netbooks and ultra-thin laptops.

In an exclusive interview before his keynote speech at the Computex exhibition in Taiwan, Intel's executive vice-president Sean Maloneyexplained how the company was changing to compete with mobile chips based on rival ARM designs.

While Intel has dominated the market for the processors used in personal computers, ARM-based chips are used in almost allsmartphones and most of today's tablets, including Apple's popular iPhone and iPad.

ARM is now moving up to compete for Intel's customers, and during ARM's press conference at Computex, Tudor Brown, president of the UK-based company, said: "By 2015, we expect that to be over 50% of the mobile PC market." However, Intel is still trying to invade ARM's territory by producing faster chips that use less power, which are needed for smaller devices.

In his keynote, Maloney touted an "emerging new breed" of ultra-thin portable PCs for which Intel has trademarked the term Ultrabook, with one of the first examples being the Asus UX21. So how will Ultrabooks differ from current models such as Apple's MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9?

To find out, read on at The Guardian here.