The Age of One App Per Website is Over

While preparing for next week's presentation on Responsive Design, I tried to recall my original uneasiness over the phone app frenzy. You remember -- that short painful period only a few months ago when either you were developing a phone app version of your site or you just weren't serious. You thought it silly? So did I. But it took me a second to remember why. I mean, this was before Responsive Web Design had sunk in as a possible solution. So why the initial uneasiness? And then of course I remembered: the notion that your average user was going to download a separate app for every site -- the equivalent of taking your collection of bookmarks and downloading a separate program for each -- was a complete absurdity. Thank God, we're beyond that. It's history.

Browser War Redux

I spose I'm showing my age by using 'Redux' instead of '2.0' but, boys and girls, I remember the first round of browser wars as if it were yesterday!

Essentially Internet Explorer booted Netscape off the face of the planet not because of any particular advantage it had over the competition but simply because it was part of the Windows OS and lock-in trumped all.

Well, since then, Microsoft has sat on the thing (so much for 'Freedom to Innovate') while an offshoot of Netscape, Mozilla, refined its own product, the open-source FireFox. Now finally MS has woken up and released IE7.

So it's the IE-Firefox Browser War all over again. But, but, argues Read/WriteWeb, what this really is is a proxy war between Microsoft and (who else?) Google with nothing less than the "multi-billion dollar advertising industry" at stake. How so, you ask? Well, read the rest of the post...

FireBug : Geek Tool of the Month

Here's something that just made the life of anyone involved with CSS or Javascript a whole lot easier. FireBug is an "extention" for the Firefox Browser that allows you to see the CSS of a web page and change it in real-time.

The Webdeveloper extention does some of this, but FireBug is far more elaborate and hence more helpful. The Screencast explaining the features talks about FireBug being a help for remembering your own CSS. That's true but I can also imagine it being extremely helpful when trying to figure out a website or template originally done by someone else. In any case, it's a great product for thems that need it. You can download it here... (h/t mezzoblue)