Mobile Developer News Roundup for Friday, June 1, 2012

A most unfortunate headline. I found this via George Takei and CrackBerry.com. A source within RIM says these layoffs could happen as early as today.

Windows 8: An Android Killer? When I was a Windows Evangelist, I argued that Android should be the target, not the iPhone, because Android provided an opportunity to win over their users (who weren’t anywhere nearly as devoted to the brand as iPhone users were) as well as developers (since the development experience for Windows Phone was, in my opinion, far nicer than for Android). Stonewash’s Daniel Sharp is working with Windows 8 and has come to appreciate the Windows Phone developer experience, writing:

Working with Windows 8 is simple and enjoyable: we spend our time adding new features and improving performance. Working with Android is complicated and painful: we spend our time trying to make it work on the thousands of different variants, which is less than ideal and simplicity always wins.

LungoJS HTML5 Mobile Framework: its creators claim that it’s “the first Mobile Framework that uses the actual features of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.” I’ve given it only the most cursory of looks, but it seems interesting and I’ve bookmarked it for a closer look-see at a later time.

Chitika says that Apple has nearly two-thirds of mobile device usage in the U.S., ten times that of Samsung. Chitika is an advertising and analytics company, and their numbers come from metrics from sites on their network (details on their methodology are available here). You can see more of their numbers in their market share report for May 2012.

Here’s a PHP function that detects whether the visitor is on a mobile browser, and does so in 220 bytes. The function’s a one-liner, but it does a pretty good job of detecting mobile browsers. Better still, the article does a great job not just explaining how it works, but it also provides a number of great ways to use it.