The latest issue of the german Android360 magazine is featuring an article by our Android experts about fragmentation on the platform.

Fragmentation on the Android platform comes in several flavors.
Mobile devices in the wild can differ on their installed Android version, their screen size/resolution and their supported hardware features.
With the advent of Android tablets the platform added a new class of supported hardware to its portfolio.
The article summarizes the main does and don’t to tackle fragmentation successfully.

If you are experiencing fragmentation problems in your Android project or want to avoid them upfront, talk to us. Our share-a-canooie service might be just the right thing for you.

Remember: think Android, think Canoo

I stumbled across this report discussing Web 2.0 within an enterprise context, which I would like to recommend:

“Web 2.0 Gets Down to Business”.

The report discusses the results of an Information Week survey and presents some interesting charts and numbers, e.g. why companies introduced RIAs , or what type of apps are in the pipeline.

(…) rich apps are the wave of the future as Web users, customers, and employees demand capabilities matching what they’ve experienced on cutting-edge sites. IT must respond, either by effectively outsourcing development or by delivering the goods itself.

(…)

But IT can get a lot of return from a more fluid user experience for employees, too. Many insurance companies create RIAs for their sales agents, using platforms such as Adobe Flex to create forms that make it easier to complete complex insurance applications and pass them in an industry-standard format to underwriting systems. Other companies use RIAs to deliver personalized management dashboards – the No. 1 choice when we asked what apps are in planning or development – as well as workflow and multimedia training tools.

Data visualization is another common RIA use that can transform the productivity and creativity level of managers and knowledge workers. A telecom company might use an RIA to support engineers by providing a visual view of complex network events and possible correlations to problems. Though RIAs generally are overkill for simple Web forms and information displays, they’re particularly well suited to support complex interactions with multiple inputs and pages, large data sets, and the multimedia content seen in geospatial data or complex medical records, for example.

The August 2008 issue (Volume 31, No. 4) of Informatik Spektrum has published a background article by Hans-Dirk Walter on Rich Internet Applications. The article is in German and can be purchased online at the publisher’s website:

“Rich Internet Applications” – Eine perfekte Kombination benutzerfreundlicher Schnittstellen mit Webtechnologie

Zusammenfassung “Rich Internet Applications” (RIA) sind Webapplikationen, die mit einer wesentlich interaktiveren Benutzerschnittstelle ausgestattet sind, als wir das bisher von den auf HTML basierten “poor ugly web applications” (PUWA) gewohnt waren.