Web Apps News & Articles

More than the ability to call apps from a smartphone's home screen, the main advantage of native apps over web applications is their ability to interface with a smartphone's hardware for added functionality. A new mobile browser called mobiUs will take mobile web pages to a different level by integrating these hardware functions into websites through HTML5.

Coders always want things done quicker and neater. Toura's Mulberry is a project in alpha to help create mobile apps, fast.

So where were we? In the first article of this series, What You Need To Know About iOS and Android, we decided that the wise publisher currently targets iOS first and Android second. In a second article, Data Formats for Fixed and Flowable Content, we agreed that HTML is the sensible way to expose a publisher’s content to the world. Today we’ll talk about how we take this content and create wonderful tablet apps.

Native apps, the bouncing icons that dot your smartphone screen, have dominated the mobile computing landscape. Programmed purely for your device’s operating system, they complete highly specified tasks in an attractive manner on a less powerful device. However, there’s another way. HTML5, CSS3 and updates to JavaScript are making feature rich mobile computing available through your mobile Web browser; they’re called Web apps and you don’t download them to your phone, you access them over the Web. But the native app/web app comparison is far from one-to-one. And when deciding whether to pursue one or the other for your business, there is much to consider.

Finally, Office 365 has arrived in beta. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud-based online business application subscription service that comes in two packages: One for enterprises with 25 employees but can go as far as 50 users, the other for enterprise users that can be scaled to as many seats as necessary.

This week there has been more in the office web productivity space, with upgrades from both Google and mobile apps developer Equitrac. The depth of SharePoint 2010 penetration has been measured as well as its implications for document storage, while SpringCM added document workflow functionality in its latest release.

European firm, e-Spirit (news, site), creates a central system for integrating almost any app into its content management system.

The latest issue of Wired magazine sports a cover article proclaiming the death on the Web as we know it -- but is it just evolution, and not the app artillery that is changing the landscape?

There have been some interesting moves in the SMB voice technology market this week with Google making Google Voice freely available and the release of eVocie’s Blackberry App. From a security point of view, research from CDW indicates that many companies are not going secure their data until the very worst happens.

For SMBs this last week was always going to be dominated by the release of Office 2010, but in the fuss the beta release of the new Hotmail service has been overlooked by many. Google has also expanded its Google places tag listing to include the entire US after its initial 11 city launch last month.

Think fast! Google Fast Flip is here and it's sure to make things interesting for web publishers.

Fast Flip is one of the newest creations from Google Labs. It is a web application that combines the qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine.

Sugar (news, site) offers up its Community Edition CRM to take its place alongside a number of other open source solutions in Microsoft's Web Application Gallery.

Microsoft, the commercial software behemoth from Redmond, Washington, continues to dip its toes into the open source pool. Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) is home to the software vendor's relationships with a few open source products such as MySQL and SugarCRM. The OSTC has been hard at work lately -- especially, in the web application space.

After releasing their own open source CMS and making it easy to install open source applications on Windows Server, what else has Redmond been up to?

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• TechCrunch's Arrington Loses It With PR Firms
• StockTwits Raises Funding
• Macworld Sans Steve
• Facebook Developers Grumble, but FB Platform 'Still Most Attractive Option'
• Read Write Web's Best Apps of 2008
• Random Scandal of the Week -- Slave Labor at HuffPost

TechCrunch's Arrington Loses It With PR Firms

In a wild, Chris-Crocker-style rant which had everyone asking "who spiked his non-foam double-latte?", Michael Arrington declared war on the PR firms that dare to ask TechCrunch to hold off on breaking news until they say so. Scared children cried and hid behind their mothers' petticoats, grown men slunk away.

Said an anonymous 'insider': "Yes, Arrington's done himself no favors with this tirade. Just in case he's damaged his reputation, perhaps he should look into hiring in some PR."

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb meanwhile wasted no time in telling Arrington he was wrong. He immediately reposted an older article on How and Why  Embargoes Work.

Remember when Facebook released its applications platform? It was unquestionably the smartest move in social networking history and the company has been a dominant force in social networking ever since then. But watch out Facebook — LinkedIn is joining the party with its OpenSocial-based application platform called Intelligent Applications.

These are not your typical applications.