Two years ago, I stepped into the mobile games market when I joined Planeto in Malmö, Sweden. With more than 5 million downloads, Planeto is a leader in knowledge-based mobile gaming. The experience at Planeto has changed me as a product creator and marketer. Like many of my Scandinavian tech colleagues, I come from the […]

The gameplay loop is what the player does over and over again. It builds on the fundamental premise that delivering entertainment is hard, but when you get there, it is obvious that you have arrived. You will see it in the smile, in the clenched fist raised in the air, or a loud “damn it!” – quite magical, when it happens.

Mobile applications draw the attention of hackers more and more each day because they have something that the attackers want: user data. Hard-coded secret keys, personal information stored in plain text on SD cards, usernames and passwords found unencrypted in databases, analytics collected and sent in the clear to remote servers, are just a few cases.

A variety of mobile devices have flooded the Web in the past years. To no one’s surprise, Google announced that starting April 21st, they’ll expand the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, in fact penalizing all sites that don’t have a mobile strategy – dubbed “Mobilegeddon” in the recent press.

JavaScript is not the world’s most elegant programming language. So much so that one of the world’s top experts on the language wrote a book about “The Good Parts”. Even so, JavaScript has rapidly become one of the most popular languages in the world and it is steadily gaining ground on mobile. Will it eventually dominate there too?

This may be the year when the mobile web apps finally go mainstream. Or, at least, their hybrid cousins will. Not because the technology will finally be ready. For most apps, it already is. Rather, the web will finally hit the big time with mobile apps precisely because we’ll talk about it less and use it more.

Softeq Development is involved in everything mobile: from business apps, digital imaging and utilities to mobile games, wearable technology, sensor-rich equipment and its remote management. They have built dozens of embedded solutions, web, and mobile applications for such clients as Nike, NVIDIA, Omron, AMD, Atlas Copco, EPSON, Disney Parks and Resorts. T. Our associate author, Alkis Polyrakis, discussed with Softeq’s CEO, Chris Howard.

Microsoft was slow to react to the step change in user experience provided by iOS and Android versus the first generation smartphone platforms. In terms of their share of the mobile OS market, Microsoft is a long way behind Apple and Google. However, as enterprises are increasingly making big investments in mobile, Microsoft still has a significant opportunity.

Despite losing in the platform wars, Microsoft’s developer ecosystem is still strong and they’re not showing much sign of wanting to give up their tools. The latest Developer Economics survey showed that 38% of mobile developers were using C# for some of their work and 16% use it as their main language. Those developers are not all focused on Microsoft platforms by a long way. So what are they doing?

WillowTree is a leading app development company that has produced over 300 titles since 2007, such as My Pregnancy Today that has seen more than 12 million downloads. Our collaborator, Alkis Polyrakis, discussed with their Systems Architect, Alex Shafran, who led the development of projects for GunBroker, Quintiles, the Red Cross and the NBA, about their strategies and tools of preference.