Why the Integrated Approach to Mobile Devices is Winning
Chris Dixon’s most recent blog post, Why the Integrated Approach to Mobile Devices is Winning, is all about the success of the approach in which the vendor makes the hardware and the software. He could’ve just as easily called it the “Apple Approach”, since they’ve been doing it that way since they first got into the desktop computer business and applied it to all the iDevices.
Microsoft has long since preferred to simply focus on software and let others build the hardware, and while it worked in the era of the desktop, it’s not working out so well for them these days. Wintel machine vendors don’t have the incentive to take the sort of design leaps and risks that Apple does, only being too happy to bump their machines’ specs slightly year after year and to increasingly take their design cues from Apple (witness the “ultrabook” trend, an admission by the industry that netbooks suck). Their recent Surface announcement is a signal that Microsoft realizes that with a disruptive technology like tablets, if you want something right, you have to do it yourself, which is the point that Dixon makes in his post.
Taming the Mobile Beast
Taming the Mobile Beast was a presentation made at O’Reilly’s Velocity 2012 conference by Google’s Patrick Meenan and Matt Welsh. on developing mobile sites. Velocity 2012’s catchphrase is “Building a faster and stronger web” and it’s a conference focused on building scalable, reliable and fast web sites. While we’ve gotten pretty good at building sites for desktop browsers, we’re still just getting started building the mobile web. Taming the Mobile Beast shows some good ideas for building mobile web sites — make sure you borrow at least a few of them!
Windows Phone 7.8’s New Start Screen
This video features Windows 7.8 — the next and final version of the Windows Phone OS that will go on current Windows Phones (only upcoming Windows Phones will be able to run Windows Phone 8) — and its new Start Screen, which lets you set the size of any tile to small, medium or large. This is one of the Windows Phone 8 features that found its way into Windows Phone 7.8.
Teehan + Lax’s Mobile UI Design PSDs
If you’re designing mobile device UIs with Photoshop, you’ll want to get your hands on these PSDs. They’re created by Toronto-based design firm Teehan + Lax, so they’re quite good.