The rapid growth on the mobile market has made many developers, designers and even users think about creating applications for these devices. Success stories for getting millions of downloads (and $) from the app store, led mostly by Angry Birds, had even more impact on that idea, and creating the next killer app is certainly a common fantasy among developers and designers. So, what are your options when you want to start creating apps for the mobile market ? The obvious answer is something like Objective C or Java but really there are loads more options than that as I found out during my search for tools. I am also a total beginner on building for the mobile but since I wanted to develop some stuff on these platforms I did some research on the options that are available. Since it’s been a very popular question I got I will let you know what I found out, which I hope will save you some time, as there be a starting point for you.

I have been to London for the past few days and one of the things I came for was to attend the Connected TV summit 2011 conference. It was an interesting couple of days, though I have to admit that for a more technical guy like me most things I was interested in were very little discussed. Nobody seemed to ever ask technical questions, which was normal I guess, seem most, if not all, attendances were consultants, marketers, business development guys from TV Content providers/producers (like BBC, Vodafone, Telecom Italia etc) or device manufacturers (like Samsung, Sony, LG, Philips etc).

Every now and then you come accross a great concept video for new devices. The main user interface between the PC and humans has been the mouse for quite a while but it’s propably about time to move on to something more intuitive! Nowadays, multi-touch screens are making a stir but in my opinion they are not very practical for real long-term use.This is mainly due to the vary difficult hand position that is required in order to use it.  This great concept video by C. Miller presents a really interesting approach to for a new input device which combines mouse, multi-touch and a new GUI for contolling your computer in a new way!

After spending lots of time making round corners for my containers using God knows how many small images, html tags and css classes I found out that I could easily ditch all that with just a bit of jQuery magic! It is important to note that this is a cross-browser solution – your browser doesn’t have to support any rounded corner CSS properties, so it works even on Internet Explorer 6.

In one of the courses I am teaching I ask from my students to create a concept blog in any subject they like and to maintain it for the whole semester. During that time they must try to post often, improve it and try to attract as many visitors as they can to it. I have been doing this for the past 3 years but I have to admin that I am not being totally fair to them… and that is because I am asking them to maintain a blog and keep working on it continuosly but I don’t have one myself! So, here it is… I finally did it and I hope I will be posting… sometimes atleast!