The Insider News

Ambrose Little[^]:

Clearly, the sentiment goes, Metro is only for consumer apps. No real line of business work could be done using that interface. I mean, as we all know, LOB apps have to have busy, intimidating, and overly complex, fiddly UIs, right? LOB implies an unfortunate huddled mass of pitiable information workers who don't deserve usable interfaces. The Man can keep them down--because they're paid to use these apps, after all.

Tim Bray[^]:

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.

UX Magazine[^]:

With more than 55 million iPads in use around the world and more than 400 million smartphones sold in 2011, companies are increasingly thinking “mobile first” when developing their web and mobile app strategies. Unfortunately, as companies rush to go mobile, they often overlook the importance of maintaining their global reach. That is, their mobile websites and apps don’t always support the breadth of languages and localized content supported by their PC-oriented websites.

Talbott Crowell[^]:

Today, users have many choices for synchronizing files and backing important memories and personal assets including music, pictures, notes, business documents, and other personal or business files. The offerings range from free to premium services, also known as the “freemium” model. In this post I will cover some of the pros and cons of each and some common scenarios for usage. I will also discuss what you get for free, and what some extra charges will get you an how much it will cost (measured in gigabytes per month).

Ars Technica[^]:

All things being equal, we'd all prefer to have more bandwidth rather than less. But of course, cost and availability both limit the bandwidth we can actually install, forcing organizations to consider not the amount of bandwidth that they want but rather the amount they need. They must also consider how those needs will change. So how can a smallish firm choose the right amount of bandwidth?

Gizmodo[^]:

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Dustin Curtis[^]:

You can call Steve Ballmer many things, but you cannot call him the “the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today,” as Forbes' Adam Hartung did in a recent article. It's easy to see Microsoft as a bumbling fool of the tech world, but when you look closely at its business, the company's core competencies, and Ballmer's decisions, a coherent picture begins to form. It's a picture of a company being run from a very rational and respectable set of philosophies.

extensionEngine[^]:

Lorem ipsum, that place holder text that you often see in website and other graphic design, has been around since the sixteenth century by some accounts, but became popular in the 60s when Madison Avenue and the golden age of advertising took off. Its use today in web design, however, is corrupting to the point that it’s become evil.

Paul Thurrott[^]:

A coming Microsoft promotion will provide Windows 8 Pro to buyers of Windows 7-based PCs for just $14.99, according to my sources. The promotion begins June 2.

.net magazine[^]:

Lea Verou takes a look at some of the misconceptions of web standards, what the W3C and its working groups actually do and how the standardisation process works.