Dead Simple Way to build JQuery mobile apps

Found an easy way to build prototype of mobile application using JQuery Mobile library.

Android ICS design guidelines

For long, Google has been criticized for lack of Android design guidelines and principles. Google seemed to listened to it and released an excellent guidelines and design patterns for Android ICS here.

Intel Medfield Performance

AnandTech has published a very interesting blog about Medfield's performance and power usage benchmarks.
As per the benchmarks, Medfield outperforms all existing players such as Google Nexus, iPhone 4s and Galaxy SII with a big margin.
Though everything looks impressive but the real handset with Medfield will not be available in the market for purchase till end of 2011 which is a big minus because by then ARM's Cortext A15 will hit the market.

Mobile Banking Features being expanded

People who have been familiar with mobile banking, including myself, wonder why mobile banking is always limited very few features such as current balances retrieval, intra-bank transfers and bill payments(again one can not add new payee). Good news is that financial institutions are rolling out some new and intriguing features slowly to mobile devices(thanks to growing popularity of iphone/blackberry apps). Recently, USAA has announced new features such as real time trading, finding car rental locations and requesting a copy of insurance proof etc. And, the real gem is Remote Deposit Capturing. RDC allows users deposit checks right from their iPhones. Take a look at this feature here.
Isn't it exciting?

Surprise! Chrome is out of beta

I have just updated my Google chrome and guess what it does not have 'beta'. Isn't it surprising(or shocking) to see a Google product coming out of beta in just over three months since it is released. I can not find the release notes but I am sure that it just might have few bug fixes not any enhancements. I hope this version does not crash while playing flash videos.

Trivia: How to update chrome?
Click on wrench icon, select 'About Google Chrome' and button to update chrome should be there, if it is not up to date.

Alternative to FlexBuilder

Trying to build flex applications? But can not pay for FlexBuilder. No worries. Open Source Community has already a solution for it but available in two pieces i.e MXML editor and AS3 plugin. We need to put them together to build a Flex application. Darran Schall has an old post that explains how to set up eclipse for working with MXML files. Though it is meant for flex's older version, the procedure remains same for newer versions too. I would just like to extend his post to make it work for Flex3 with MyEclipse.

Step 1. Get new xmls xsd file for Flex 3 version from xsd4mxml project.

Step 2. Start MyEclipse, from the menu, select Window -> Preferences. Select General -> Content Types. On the right, expand Text and highlight XML. Click the "Add" button and enter "*.mxml" as the file type. Click OK.

Step 3. Again from the menu, select Window -> Preferences. Expand "MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench" -> "Files and Editors" ->"XML". Click "User Specified Entries" and click "Add" and use the following values.

URI: browse for the path to the mxml.xsd file downloaded at Step 1.
Key: http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml

Step 4. Click "OK" to save the changes and close the window.

That is it. Set to create/modify mxml file with code assisting.

Now the second part. Download an eclipse plug-in from www.axdt.org that helps you to work with ActionScript 3.0. Though this plug-in does not have code assistance feature for AS3 but definitely good start to developing and compiling AS3 classes.

Happy building FLEX applications!!!

Cloud Computing

Check out this link for an excellent guide on what is Cloud Computing and where are the top cloud computing providers such as Google, SalesForce and Microsoft currently are and what they gonna offer in near future.