A brighter future for mobile applications?

Since the Chrome OS announcement the other day I’ve been thinking more about what a world with rich enough web APIs to support all general purpose applications might look like. I’m not sure that it’ll happen, but it sounds like Google is putting their weight behind it and they’ve been successful in the past at …

Social media in the Sahara desert

My wife and I just finished a week long camel trek in eastern Morocco with Berber nomads. While our hosts had no formal education, no running water, no grid electricity (just a little solar), no flush toilets and no floors in their homes, no land lines and no computers they did have mobile phones. Pretty much everyone seemed …

A simpler mobile OpenID workflow?

Chris Messina posted today about the problems with current OpenID work-flows for mobile users. In spite of a long list of chores I was intending to complete today I had a bit of an experiment with an approach to solving this. The main problem I wanted to solve was to allow a user to prove …

The Sidekick ID and the iPhone

There were two interesting announcements today. First the Sidekick ID which had been previously leaked was formally announced and reviews have started to show up. Secondly Apple announced that the OS X Leopard will ship three months late – more than two years after the previous release of OS X. This slip is being seen as evidence that Apple is having trouble building as many products at once as it wants to.

In the four years I was at Danger we were building exactly one product at a time. We failed to separate the development of the hardware, the OS and the applications. Separating the client and server schedules was a slow and painful process. In the two years since I’ve left things seem to have improved. The fact that they’re able to ship two products (even if they are quite similar) is really exciting. That Danger is succeeding where Apple, with their 30 years of experience, is beginning to stumble is cause for congratulations.