No, not the wee folk. Let them stay in the forest.  However CSS image sprites can magically speed up your site by reducing the number of requests and the amount of data used. To better understand spprites, I added them to a popular mobile news site; and I saw a 33% improvement in download speed! Interested in an easy fix that can really speed up your app?  Read on!!

A recent article by Channel Insider emphasized the growing need for mobile application developers due to the skyrocketing demand of customers. According to GlobalLogic president Shashank Sumant, the simple fact of the matter is customers are not sure what platforms will eventually become dominant in the mobile computing space so they want to hedge their bets by supporting them all. While this may seem like a good choice, it takes a considerable amount of resources.

The article’s author, Michael Vizard, says the reality of mobile application development is that solution providers are going to have to have applications that run both natively and on the Web. One of the challenges of this mentioned by Sumant is that cross-platform mobile application development projects require a design-driven approach to application development that most developers still don’t fully appreciate.

Using the non-blocking and event driven programming model of Node.js, WebOS is enabling a familiar and low-power method for building software for mobile devices.

Many are touting the mobile web as the future of the mobile app with the advent of HTML5 and the standardization of APIs that will allow us to touch mobile phone specific components like camera, location, and accelerometer. Today, I will give a brief overview of two mobile javascript frameworks that can enable you to create native looking and feeling apps that will run across many platforms: jQuery Mobile & DHTMLX Touch.

With the numerous cross-platform application development solutions out there, Canappi is one that takes a different approach to mobile app creation. Canappi focuses on simplifying and abstrating the development process by leveraging common tools. It is as simple as creating a "mdsl" file, which in turn is used by the Canappi platform to generate the necessary native code.