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Finally setting sail.

It is pretty obvious that Mobile Devices will eventually overtake the number of PC's. When this will happen is open to debate. So what. Well I think this will mean we will drop the word "mobile" and we will call everything a "device". The connected world will be dominated by the device. People will have multiple devices, phones, tablets and everything in between. I suspect most people will have at least two devices, a phone and probably a tablet, iPad or an Android device. So, what about the PC.? Well, the key word arising from the PC demise will be "specialisation". There will be a group of people who will need the power and versatility of a specialised device. A good example of this type of specialisation is the recent Dell / Ubuntu PC for Developers. Here is a device that is targeted to a specific group of people who have IT requirements that exceed the normal device. There are other markets that need this specialisation such as Gr...

Presenting information visually via a map is often a compelling paradigm for representing data. In these circumstances Google maps is a worthy choice. Google Maps is supported by a simple and easy to use Javascript API. This means you can integrate it into your web application relatively easily. My approach to web development tends to favour a server based approach. I tend to lean on the server more to do the HTML and JavaScript generation. This works for me in many ways and I end up with less JavaScript code in the client. I realise there is a tendency these days to shuffle a lot to the browser, but I tend to think this isn't a great option in many circumstances. This approach does mean I need to manipulate geographic locations on the server. I then generate Javascript and HTML which is fed back to the client for rendering. I love simple libraries and constructs and hand coding geographic locations is difficult work. This means I need a library which is simple to use, but ...