Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You’ve probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn’t.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

"As sleep researchers, we do believe that there's an intimate relationship between insufficient sleep and the drive to store fat," Dr. Helene Emsellem of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Md., told us.

The connection between poor sleep and higher body weights has been documented in shift workers such as nurses, in mothers of infants, and even in toddlers and teens. In some cases, people do eat more when their schedules are wacky. But Emsellem says it's also possible that something more primitive is at play here.

At first things are easy. For simple screens, using a webview might be faster than writing a native implementation. As you add functionality to the webview, the complexity increases until you give up and write everything native.

Unconsidered design (or lack of design) tends to simply gravitate towards the familiar, which is a natural instinct when we’re lost in some way. The desktop windowing metaphor is familiar from older computing devices… and that’s all. Its suitability to the iPad’s form factor, usage scenarios, and current app interaction models was not considered. It introduces additional frames of interaction and cognitive load, and disregards the interaction heritage and environment of the platform.

If you could only do one thing to prepare your desktop site for mobile and had to choose between employing media queries to make it look good on a mobile device or optimizing the site for performance, you would be better served by making the desktop site blazingly fast.

With the report into the tragedy of Air France 447 due next month, Airbus’s 'brilliant’ aircraft design may have contributed to one of the world’s worst aviation disasters and the deaths of all 228 onboard.

After a good amount of digging and some pointed swear words aimed in the Wayback Machine’s direction, I’ve compiled a complete history of the last two years of Android updates.

Two years before the T-Mobile G1 introduced the world to Android, Google presented carriers with the "Google Phone — a device that looked a lot more like the portrait QWERTY Android prototype shown in early 2008.

Already, about 8% of information workers are using Mac computers, and as more workers begin using iPads and iPhones on corporate networks, Microsoft’s share of the overall operating system for business devices — including PCs, smartphones and tablets — is expected to fall below 50% in 2016.

It looks like the mobile story for 2012 is not going to be so good for Android. It appears as though the operating system is in choppy waters, and is suddenly facing a lot of trouble.

We're going to lay out all the small and big problems we're seeing for Android in this post.

One of the common challenges when designing responsive design for mobile is the navigation menu. If the site has many sections or pages, it gets challenging to squeeze all the items into a small mobile resolution. The navigation most likely ends up running into multiple lines or the buttons stacking on top each other. So I'm going to review some of the design solution and provide a quick tutorial on how to create a mobile navigation with jQuery.

The notion that you should create a separate, stripped-down version for 'the mobile use case' might be appropriate if such a clean mobile use case existed, but it doesn't.

Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what's needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.

The longer term test of mobile platform performance will be in the recurring purchase rates. Loyalty must be earned and preserved. I.e. “You come for the product, you stay for the ecosystem.”

So far, the iPhone seems to be getting a passing grade while Android has yet to face the test.

Rovio has announced that Angry Birds Space was downloaded 10 million times in less than three days. In fact, the game has been downloaded half a billion times since it was released three years ago. It’s amazing that the Angry Birds phenomenon is still so powerful, but not surprising when viewed through the lens of behavioral psychology.

So the bottom line is, as a consumer, how much is one willing to tolerate this? If someone like me who is an astute observer of the industry has to do such intense research on which Android device to buy based on the potential for ongoing support and then ends up getting burned in the process, what is the average consumer to do?

So I’ve decided that unless major improvements occur in the management of the Android ecosystem by Google in the next year, and if conditions for supporting handsets by the Tier 1 and main US wireless carriers do not improve dramatically, the Galaxy Nexus and the Droid Bionic are going to be my last Android smartphones.

And I’ve also decided that until the support situation substantially improves, I am no longer going to recommend Android-based products to my friends, family and colleagues. I’ll point them towards Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone instead. At least with these platforms, you’re guaranteed core OS updates and bugfixes for the length of your contract.

Given that Android's market share has continued to explode over the last 12 months, you can't blame consumer disinterest for developer apathy in the platform; the culprit is--you guessed it--fragmentation.

"In Q1 2011 Android was nearly neck-and-neck with iOS in terms of developer interest," the Appcelerator/IDC report states. "Among developers, Android (in both tablet form and smartphone) held almost as much interest as iPads and iPhones. In the past year, developer interest in both Android platforms has begun to wane... We believe this is mostly due to the fragmentation Android continues to experience and that Google seems unable to curtail, and the continued success of Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and iPad. This fragmentation, coupled with iPads continuing to outsell all Android tablets combined, has swayed developers increasingly towards iOS and away from Android."

From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this.  While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we've done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles.

The gist of the carriers’ lament is this: We do the hard work and someone else is making all the money. And by someone else they mean a certain interloping personal computer company that has, without the slightest experience in the technical (and deal-making) intricacies of the mobile phone industry, inexplicably lucked into the smartphone business and pocketed an unfair share of the cash.

And the interesting thing is that the negative things people say about Bootstrap today sound exactly like the negative things people said about the Mac in 1984. And in both cases, the things that people didn't like were what made them important. permalink

Shadow lets you see one app running across an almost unlimited number of devices. You pick the devices and sync them via WiFi with your desktop computer, and when you open a web page and turn on Shadow, those devices will “follow” your clicks through each page, allowing you to see what’s broken, what works, and how the whole shebang looks on a range of smaller screens.

I realised, giving my answer, that I've never written down my objections to Android. Before we get into this, let's understand that I'm primarily talking about "what's wrong with Android from the perspective of someone planning a long-term 1:1 deployment in a school". You can argue that these points don't matter in the grand scheme of things but these are the things that I choose to care about in my deployments. I ask these questions of every platform.

So *that's* what that error code means...

Mozilla is expected Wednesday to announce plans for its own app store, to be called the Mozilla Marketplace, offering mobile apps that could run equally well on an iPhone, an Android phone or a Windows Phone device. Mozilla is also working to develop a smartphone that would not be locked into the "walled gardens" of apps, operating systems and devices that are now controlled by Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft, Amazon and a few others.

Just thinking about mobile users isn’t enough to address the situation. Many mistakes are still committed during the process, and knowing what they are is the first step in effectively avoiding them in future projects.

The following are the most common mistakes on mobile websites.

Tossing up another dialog asking for user confirmation doesn’t solve the problem users are faced with. It just puts a band-aid on it. At the core is a more fundamental problem in how iOS handles permissions and access to data. Basically, I have no idea what sort of permissions or access an app wants until I download it and launch it the first time. Moreover, I really don’t to see another dialog pop up in my face as I’m using an app.

If an app wants access to all of these, it usually barrages users with a stack of dialogs on its first launch. The barrage-of-dialogs approach, like Windows Vista’s security warnings, isn’t great: users get overwhelmed or annoyed and just start carelessly dismissing all of them without reading them.

The undated slide shows 260,000 downloads of the USA Today app for Kindle Fire, the Android-based tablet released by Amazon last fall. That is double the 130,000 cumulative downloads of the USA Today app for other Android tablets.

“Cocktails” is a mix of HTML5, Node.JS, CSS3, JavaScript and a lot of ingenious, creative mind-bending tricks from Yahoo!’s engineers. Today, we are announcing two Cocktails: Yahoo!’s Mojito, an environment-agnostic JavaScript web application framework, and Yahoo! Manhattan, a hosted platform for Mojito-based applications.

Yesterday I opened up the repo for Serenade.js to the public, and discussion ensued on Twitter and Hacker News. A lot of people are asking why we would need yet another client side framework, so I thought I would write down why I think Serenade offers something we haven’t really seen yet.

I have recently been using a small amount of CoffeeScript at work and evaluating its merit in my web development toolbox. This post is about a particular feature in CoffeeScript that is poorly considered.

Today we're going to discuss an effective set of patterns for large-scale JavaScript application architecture. The material is based on my talk of the same name, last presented at LondonJS and inspired by previous work by Nicholas Zakas.

This post will describe the project, and detail my experiences developing it in CoffeeScript.

The primary goal of this project would be for the feedback/demand to kickstart jquery.com into re-organizing its code-base so it's more modular since we believe we've proved the most useful parts of jQuery is a fraction of its code-base.

The company smashed most expectations yesterday when it announced its iPhone sales for the last three months of 2011 totaled over 37 million units, a figure that exceeds the number of babies born on planet earth--using the global average daily birth rate --during a comparable period (about 98 days).

Complex code is far more afraid of pair-programmers than solo programmers.

clever code is just never worth it

Investing so much time on the mobile version was really fun and really sensible, it made the next bit a breeze.

Do you ever find yourself looking at code that you have absolutely no recollection of writing? #disturbing #codeblackout

Getting enough sleep and prioritizing it over any other task, is one of the most important things I believe. Here are a few thoughts on why sleep and thinking about your sleeping habits is so vital:

So, with the hype of businesses wanting to have an iOS app continues into 2012, I thought it would make a good post trying to explain why the cost is high by breaking down the steps and variables involved. I hope it will benefit both the non-iOS developers and business people who need to make decisions or just want to understand the process. The ideas in this post are not restricted to just iOS, they are also applicable to other mobile platforms (Android, Windows Mobile, maybe Blackberry) to a large extent.

Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N' Out, and you'll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures. 

While students claim they can easily multitask between email, Facebook and his lecture, Nemerov says overwhelming evidence in students’ lives and grades proves differently.

Nemerov is sympathetic to those who didn’t get into the class, but says he’s more concerned about students seeing the artwork clearly and actually paying attention to the content, not to Facebook.

Apple already had everyone's billing information from iTunes ... you could buy things just by typing in your password ... That, for the first time, brought very, very easy payment to the modern software world. That, more than anything, is why there is a business for paid apps... .

“Use things that are going to work great in two years.”

The fragmentation of Android is very real and very problematic for end users, developers, mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Google. However fragmentation does not mean Android is going to “die” or “fail” as some seem to think.

In the wake of Rick Perry's debate snafu, here's how you can prepare for a big presentation and how to handle those hiccups.

Every meeting must have one clear decision maker. If there's no decision maker -- or no decision to be made -- the meeting shouldn't happen.

No more than 10 people should attend.

Every person should give input, otherwise they shouldn't be there.

No decision should ever wait for a meeting. If a meeting absolutely has to happen before a decision should be made, then the meeting should be scheduled immediately.

​iPad users are estimated to have cumulatively downloaded three billion applications since the launch of the iPad in 2010. This was 19% of all cumulative downloads by Apple users. The iPhone took as long as two years before being able to achieve this level of downloads, while the iPad made it within nearly a year and a half. In comparison, Android tablets only have around 440 million downloads thus far.

The United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6.  In addition, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines are also entering the Champions’ Circle.  We hope this means more developers and IT Pros can consider IE6 a “low-priority” at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser.

Maryland's Redish says when he lays out the case against lecturing, colleagues often nod their heads, but insist their lectures work just fine. Redish tells them — lecturing isn't enough anymore.

"With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don't need faculty to do it," Redish says. "Get 'em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty."

I hear it everywhere. The web is dead, apps are the future. #

A picture named webIsDead.gifI heard it first on the cover of Wired Magazine in March 1997 and again in August 2010. I was so impressed I added it to my blogroll, as a reminder to all that you're reading a dead medium. #

That was said in jest, of course. :-) #

I'll keep playing here while the rest of you flirt with apps. I'll be here when you come back. I know it's going to happen. Here's why. #

Linking

It was that speech, plus Google's app, plus a well-timed interstitial that got me thinking. Why is it that I find this concept of the future so repulsive.

It’s lonely and beautiful. I look at your empty seat and think about you being in it. … Then I practice. I often practice stuff you’ll never see. For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a hundred-year-old trick called the David P. Abbott Ball. It is a very, very hard trick, almost like juggling. I put in an hour almost every day.

About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam. So, if you do the math, people were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that’s what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.

Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology

Not wanting to build an observer library in isolation (and believing that jQuery’s data support would work in a pinch), I started working on the first problem: building a template engine powerful enough to build automatically updating templates. The kernel of the idea for Handlebars (helpers and block helpers as the core primitives) came out of a discussion with Carl Lerche back when we were still at Engine Yard, and I got to work.

I am not interested in syntax or semantics or architecture. Instead I care most about three things: first the API docs; second the rename refactoring; and third the debugger. The further you get from the civilized regions of programming the less developed these crucial logistics become.

Web browsers are used by 42.9% of all US mobile subscribers. Native apps are used by 42.5% (in the 3 month period ending Sept 2011). As mobile Internet use has grown, use of the browser has remained consistent. Last year, 36.4% used their mobile browser and 34.4% used applications they downloaded. That’s one app (the browser) holding its own against any number of downloaded apps.

The problem was: developers were testing, but they had no way to orchestrate who was using the machine at the time. Also, the manner in which the test suite was architected involved a lot of shared fixtures which would inevitably cause collusions during concurrent test runs. Sigh…

Developers these days are spoiled with choice when it comes to selecting an MVC framework for structuring and organizing JavaScript web apps. Backbone, Spine, SproutCore, JavaScriptMVC... the list of new and stable solutions goes on and on, but just how do you decide on which to use in a sea of so many options?

To help solve this problem, I created TodoMVC - a project which offers the same Todo application implemented using MVC concepts in most of the popular JavaScript MVC frameworks of today. Solutions look and feel the same, have a common feature set, and make it easy for you to compare the syntax and structure of different frameworks, so you can select the one you feel the most comfortable with.

An example Backbone application contributed by Jérôme Gravel-Niquet. This demo uses a simple LocalStorage adapter to persist Backbone models within your browser.

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Handlebars provides the power necessary to let you build semantic templates effectively with no frustration.

Mustache templates are compatible with Handlebars, so you can take a Mustache template, import it into Handlebars, and start taking advantage of the extra Handlebars features.

Zepto.js is a minimalist JavaScript framework for mobile WebKit browsers, with a jQuery-compatible syntax.

The goal: a ~5k micro-library that handles most basic drudge work with a nice API so you can concentrate on getting stuff done.

Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux.

Typically they lack what my colleague Scott Shaw calls "deliverability" - such things as support for version control, testing, and a deployment pipeline. This makes changes brittle and hard to control.

In the high-stakes world of public speaking, only one rule applies: Whatever works.

The Open/Closed Principle has been around for a while. Many developers attempt to use it consciously, and others do things which tend to promote closure without thinking about it. What is the net effect on code?

One of the nice things about having a version control history is that we can query it.

Good Code flow chart.

“Just what the world needs—another sucky JavaScript library,” he said. When I asked him what made it ‘sucky’, he elaborated. “It’s a JavaScript library written by Java developers who clearly don’t get JavaScript.”

For the rest of the day, to anyone who would listen, Dmitry cited example after example of the terrible code he had found when he went digging through Closure. His biggest fear, he told me, was that people would switch from truly excellent JavaScript libraries like jQuery to Closure on the strength of the Google name.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I told him. “Send me some examples of this terrible code and I’ll publish it on SitePoint.”

This note is an overview and summary of what we’ve learned during studying of “ECMA-262-3 in detail” series. Every section of the note contains references to the appropriate chapters of the ES3 series which you, if have a wish and interest, may read and get deeper explanation and descriptions.

In February 2010 John Resig, the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. During this 25 minute talk John outlines many of the new features and ideas behind jQuery 1.4. A full transcript is available below.

Up until a few years ago I'd never done any type of public speaking. I'm outspoken among friends, but generally shy around strangers. However, some opportunities presented themselves and I decided to take the leap into the world of presenting. I thought it might be helpful to document some lessons I've learned. If you decide to take the leap into presenting, I hope these ideas make your journey a bit easier than mine.

The Extreme Presentation method is a step-by-step approach for designing presentations of complex or controversial information in ways that drive people to action. It is based on extensive empirical research and has been pilot tested among leading corporations, including Microsoft, Exxon-Mobil, Kimberly-Clark, eBay, and Motorola.