Find: Mozilla focusing on mobile

Update on Firefox Marketplace

Modern browsers based on open standards (like Firefox) enable developers to create amazing Web applications and websites. Mozilla is rapidly increasing the capabilities of the browser platform, which means developers can build more and more of their applications using Web technologies and we’ve been working hard to add more capabilities to the Web as a platform.

We first started working on building these capabilities into the Web and developing our own Firefox Marketplace last year. And, we have seen on the Web and particularly in mobile – Apps, those focused experiences are gaining massive adoption by consumers.

The future is mobile and we’ve made amazing progress with exposing Web APIs across platforms. We’re working to unlock the power of the Web on mobile, just as we did on desktop.

To this end, and based on what we have learned through our efforts to date, we’re now focusing our Marketplace offering. While we previously believed that desktop was the right initial first step to building out an HTML5 app ecosystem, we now believe that we need to pivot further and lead the way with mobile.

We’re not in any way changing our commitment to add features to Desktop as we still feel that Apps are as relevant on desktop as any other environment, but we do need to focus on mobile for the next few releases and as such you won’t see any changes in Desktop for a short period. As soon as mobile has caught up to desktop in features related to Apps we will refocus.

This means:

1) Mobile platforms will be the first target for our HTML5 apps, with desktop to follow providing the means for users to discover and manage their experience;

2) Initial platform targets are Firefox OS and Firefox for Android, with others to follow from our successes there.

We’re happy with the progress we’ve made and excited to share more soon about the next steps for the Web apps ecosystem and Firefox Marketplace. Stay tuned!

Find: Day One journal creator Paul Mayne: 'expressing things without filters is liberating'

Day One journal creator Paul Mayne: 'expressing things without filters is liberating'

paul mayne

Paul Mayne is founder and designer at Bloom Built, a Salt Lake City company that produces Day One, a journaling app for iOS and Mac. With Day One, Mayne has become known as one of the rare developers who can effortlessly create a powerful yet minimalist and refined user experience. Mayne took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about why we should journal, his first memory of the internet, and the app most important to his daily productivity. You can find him on Twitter at @paulmayne.

Find: Surface pricing - $499 for 32GB, preordering starts today

Surface pricing: $499 for 32GB, preordering starts today at 9am PT



Magenta is obviously the best keyboard color.

After maintaining almost complete radio silence about its Windows RT Surface tablets since first revealing them in June, Microsoft has announced pricing and availability.

The cheapest way to buy into Surface will be the $499 base model. This will give you 32GB of storage, but won't come with a Touch Cover membrane keyboard-cum-cover. $599 will get you a 32GB model with a black Touch Cover, and $699 a 64GB unit, also with a black Touch Cover.

Standalone Touch Covers in black, white, magenta, cyan, and red will retail for $119.99. Type Covers—a clicky keyboard with actual key switches—will come in black only, and cost $129.99.

Find: Google publishes more guidelines to help developers build 'quality tablet apps'

This can't hurt. Google tablets are hurting. 

Google publishes more guidelines to help developers build 'quality tablet apps'

Nexus 7 box

Google took the launch of the Nexus 7 as an opportunity to spur developers into making higher-quality tablet apps, a problem that has plagued the platform since the launch of the Xoom early last year. Now, with increased pressure from Amazon in the form of its new Kindle Fire hardware and the looming launch of Windows 8 tablets, Google has put together another tool for developers in the form of its tablet app quality checklist. In ten easy steps, Google lays out the most important things developers needs to do for their tablet apps to be successful, including optimizing for larger screens, taking advantage of a tablet's extra space, and adjusting fonts and widgets.

The list goes into plenty of detail for each item, with a number of...

Find: Path co-founder Dustin Mierau - 'an app without design is like a good story printed on a dot matrix printer'

He likes Greensboro NC dev shop iconfactory. 

Path co-founder Dustin Mierau: 'an app without design is like a good story printed on a dot matrix printer'

dustin mierau path 1020

Dustin Mierau is co-founder and Chief Designer at Path, a journal and social network for Android and iPhone. Before Path, he co-founded Macster, which eventually became Napster for Mac. Mierau took a few minutes to talk to The Verge about the finer points of designing great software, how to stay focused, and about remembering the internet before it was filled with ads. You can find him on Twitter at @dmierau.

Find: Japanese carrier SoftBank buys control of Sprint for $20 billion

Japanese carriers reappearing on international scene. 

CNBC: Japanese carrier SoftBank buys control of Sprint for $20 billion

Sprint store (STOCK)

Sprint confirmed on Friday that it was in talks to sell more than two thirds of Sprint Nextel stock to Japan's third-place wireless carrier, SoftBank — and now CNBC reports that a deal has been accepted by the boards of both companies. The deal is the latest in a series of acquisitions by SoftBank, and as Nikkei reported earlier, the carrier intends to use the Sprint buyout to expand its global business, and lower its costs for devices and networking equipment. CNBC says SoftBank will buy $8 billion of shares from Sprint and $12 billion worth from shareholders, and that Sprint will receive proceeds from a bond sale to help it complete its acquisition of Clearwire. CNBC says the deal is expected to be announced tomorrow, so stay tuned...

Mobile data usage in the US has more than doubled in the last year

Mobile data usage in the US has more than doubled in the last year

Wireless tower (shutterstock)

CTIA has released the latest data from its semi-annual wireless industry survey, it seems that the continued growth of LTE networks and corresponding strong sales for smartphones in the US have lead to mobile broadband usage more than doubling over the last year. The most recent CTIA data, obtained by All Things D, shows that US carriers handled 1.16 trillion megabytes of data between July 2011 and June 2012, up 104 percent from the 568 billion megabytes used between July 2010 and June 2011. During the timeframe of this huge increase, we've seen Verizon's LTE network grow by leaps and bounds, AT&T and Sprint launch true LTE networks of their own, and dominating performances from both Apple and Samsung — and that's without taking into...

Job: 15k opportunity for an open source coder/programmer

This is a great cause. 

Best, Ben 

Find: indyState by itu and ctia - Cell phones hit six billion worldwide

Talk is cheap: Cell phones hit six billion worldwide

It’s something that we all knew but perhaps didn’t fully appreciate—just about all of us have cell phones now, and we use them a lot.

According to new figures published by the International Telecommunications Union on Thursday, the global population has purchased 6 billion cellphone subscriptions. Fully a third of those, for a total of two billion, are from China and India.

As smartphone prices continue to fall, and more people have access to other data devices, the ITU also reported mobile broadband continues to rapidly grow.

Find: Profits plummet at HTC, which recently closed Durham office

Profits plummet at HTC, which recently closed Durham office

HTC's Vivid 4G phoneThe Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturer says profits drop 79 percent as competition from Samsung and Apple increases.

Find: The iPhone 5 Display - Thoroughly Analyzed

Atech either its usual thorough job. 

The iPhone 5 Display: Thoroughly Analyzed

When Apple rolled out the iPhone 5, they announced that it had a full sRGB gamut, which the new iPad almost achieves and would be a substantial improvement over the 4 and 4S displays. The slight increase in screen resolution and size means we are looking at a new panel than the previous generations used as well, with the new panel being speced at 800:1 contrast ratio and 500 nits of brightness. I don’t have a 4S to test, but used my iPhone 4 that was bought on launch day and has been in use since then for comparison. Numbers were run using CalMAN 5 software, and a SpectraCal C6 colorimeter that was profiled from an i1Pro spectrometer. All readings are the average of three measurements from the C6, except for very dark readings where ten measurements were taken for more accuracy.

For comparing the minimum black and white levels in the iPhone 4 and 5, I set the brightness to the minimum level where I could get a reading from a black screen. At the minimum value I couldn’t get any reading, which indicates that it’s below the 0.001 threshhold that the C6 is capable of reading. Both phones had a minimum black level reading of 0.006 nits, but the iPhone 4 had a white level of 5.669 nits compared to the iPhone 5 and its reading of 8.303 nits. This gives us contrast ratios of 1008:1 for the iPhone 4 and 1313:1 for the iPhone 5. Both are ahead of the specified numbers, but the iPhone 5 is clearly better here.

At maximum brightness, the iPhone 4 has a maximum white output of 390 nits, and the iPhone 5 clearly trumps that with 562 nits. The backlight of the iPhone 4 could have become slightly dimmer over time, but using LEDs it really should not have faded much. Black levels for the phones are 0.355 for the iPhone 4 and 0.412 for the iPhone 5. This gives us contrast ratios of 1097:1 for the iPhone 4 and 1364:1 for the iPhone 5. Clearly contrast levels have been improved here, despite the move to a larger screen that sometimes can affect them.

Display Brightness

Display Brightness

Contrast Ratio

Looking at the grayscale, the iPhone 4 puts out an average dE2000 of almost 10 across the spectrum. The grayscale has a very noticeab...

Event: sample ms surface at southpoint - Microsoft to open Durham 'pop-up' store Oct. 26

Microsoft to open Durham 'pop-up' store Oct. 26

Microsoft Surface tablet The Streets of Southpoint in Durham mall is one of numerous sites across the country getting Microsoft "pop-up" stores as they are being called for the holidays.

Find: Frog's Mark Rolston - the 'Minority Report' interface is a 'terrible idea'

Some provocative thinking here. 

Frog's Mark Rolston: the 'Minority Report' interface is a 'terrible idea'

Mark Rolston Frog

Mark Rolston holds the title of chief creative officer for Frog, the venerable design company responsible for the look of Sony Trinitron televisions in the seventies and Apple's minimalistic "Snow White" design language of the eighties. In 1999, it was Mark who personally drove the creation of Dell.com to become the top-grossing e-commerce site in the world. Now, as a C-level executive with 18-years at Frog, Mark's responsible for driving the global creative vision for the 43-year old organization. More specifically, Mark's helping companies remove the "computer" from computing, making it a diffused and transparent part of our daily lives.

Find: A behind-the-scenes look at LinkedIn’s mobile engineering

A behind-the-scenes look at LinkedIn’s mobile engineering




Aurich Lawson

LinkedIn is the career-oriented social network that prides itself on professional excellence. But the company's original mobile offering was anything but—it left much to be desired. There was an iPhone application, but no support for Android or tablets. The backend was a rickety Ruby on Rails contraption; afflicted with seemingly insurmountable scalability problems. And despite serving only seven or eight percent of the LinkedIn population, the company's original mobile build required approximately 30 servers in order to operate. This was clearly not made to sustain a growing mobile user base.

Now, a little over a year has passed since LinkedIn relaunched its mobile applications and website. And the company recently marked the anniversary by debuting a number of new mobile features, including real-time notifications and support for accessing company pages from mobile apps.

Mobile is gradually becoming a central part of the LinkedIn landscape. The company says roughly 23 percent of its users access the site through one of its mobile applications, up from ten percent last year. As our friends at Wired reported last month, the underlying design language and development philosophy behind the company’s mobile experience is playing an influential role as the company works to revamp its website.

Find: Pew survey - Half of US adults now have smartphone or tablet, more reading in browser than apps

Survey: Half of US adults now have smartphone or tablet

News going mobile Half of all adult Americans now own either a tablet computer or a smartphone, and one-third use their mobile devices to view news stories and video clips at least once a week, a new report from Pew Research finds.