My former colleague Sergi Mansilla, now working on FirefoxOS, wrote a nice article about the promise of FirefoxOS: The fact that any website is a potential app can’t be underestimated. By tapping into extremely popular and flexible technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, Firefox OS instantly promoted millions of web and JavaScript developers into app developers. All they have to do is download a free simulator addon (and not even that is strictly necessary if your app is not going to use phone APIs).

While Facebook released its video calling feature yesterday, something much more interesting may be coming, possibly later this month. It is called Project Spartan. Our interpretation of TechCrunch’s posts about Spartan is that Facebook will do for mobile what it did for its regular web version before: upgrade its “application” status to “platform”. A few years ago Facebook started enabling developers to build applications into Facebook, integrating them with the timeline, getting access to friend information etc.

It’s always interesting to observe how regular desktop web interactions can be translated to mobile. With the launch of Google+ with accompanying mobile web app, Google has changed the tab bar along the top of their mobile web apps. At first sight, they seem to have shrunk significantly: When looking more closely you notice an orange thing at the top right. What’s up there? To find out you can swipe the tab bar downwards:

David Singleton monitored his Internet connection while on a train journey. Most people have experienced what it is like using mobile Internet in a driving vehicle — it’s generally pretty unreliable. David found that the big issue is incidental latency. Latency can vary wildly, in his measurements between 100 milliseconds and 20 seconds. TCP does not deal well with such differences, due to its exponential backing off. Do we need something built on IP that deals better with extremely unreliable connections?

Web apps vs. native apps for mobile — this appears to be what everybody is talking about these days. I think native apps currently provide the best user experience, don’t you? As a user, given the choice between a web app and native app, which one would you pick? Unless you signed your life away to the web browser, it’s likely going to be the native one. Still, reasons to develop for the web are there: portability, simpler deployment, perhaps simpler development — all developer reasons.

It seems to be an everlasting battle: what’s “better”: developing mobile _native_applications or developing mobile web applications? Sadly, the answer is boring: it depends. What matters to you as the developer? Multiple-platform support. Web applications are a cheap way to go. Develop your application once, run on many platforms immediately. You can reuse the same code base on multiple platforms. When going the native route you will likely have to entirely redevelop (and maintain) your application on every platform.

Last week, for the first time, I had some time to play some of the games I had been buying over the past months on my iPad. The one that made most of and impression was Aralon, a role-playing game (RPG). I spent several hours running around in its virtual world, shooting bad guys with my bow. I’m not much of a gamer. Generally I find it somewhat of a waste of time.

GigaOM: The number of mobile-friendly websites is increasing faster than expected, according to the latest data from Taptu, a touch-focused mobile search company. Not only is the touch web growing, it’s growing at a faster rate than Apple’s iTunes App Store, which currently has an annualized revenue rate of nearly a billion dollars.

It was January 9th, 2007, a highly anticipated date for many. Steve Jobs got on stage of MacWorld and, for the first time, pulled an iPhone out of his pocket. He showed off the device and spoke: “We figured a really great way to develop applications for this amazing device, and we call them ‘web apps’.” Today, three and a half years later, the users of this amazing device go crazy buying and downloading native applications from a locked-down AppStore.

The past week or two I have been developing an asynchronous object-relational mapper in Javascript, called persistence.js. Its main use-case, right now, is to simplify the database component of offline-capable web applications, like the mobile web applications that I’m working on. But with some tweaking it should also be usable in server-side applications, like node.js servers. It uses the SQLite database that is available in modern Webkit-based browsers (like Safari 4 and Google Chrome), or the Google Gears datastore that is available in any browser that runs the Google Gears browser extension (like Firefox).

In case you missed it, Apple launched the iPad yesterday. Essentially it’s a beautiful looking giant iPod Touch running the iPhone/iPod OS, slightly adapted to take better advantage of the bigger 10" screen. It’s available at a remarkably (for Apply, and the hardware you get) low price starting at $499. Not only does it look like a bigger iPod and runs its software, it also comes with the usual suspects: an App Store, synchronization through iTunes etc.

Now that we decided on a domain and target platform of our DSL, it is time to explore our target platform. Although I have used HTML, CSS and Javascript for many years, I never looked that seriously into the possibilities of especially CSS and Javascript. To help me with that I’ve been reading a few books: Javascript: The Good Parts, excellent book about Javascript, helping you avoid all that bad parts * jQuery in Action, good book about jQuery