This week Facebook announced an update for their iOS app whose main change is a faster overall experience. Going deeper into technical details, we have “Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS“, a nice post explaining what changes have been done.
I have just read Christian Heilmann’s post about Boot to Gecko and I am very excited to see how HTML5 + JS + CSS3 stack can ever power a mobile phone user interface.
These are good times for web development. It is moving from client side web development, to server side, then to mobile apps, and now as the top layer used to run all the applications of a typical phone. We need browsers and OS makers to push forward these technologies, implementing better Javascript engines, and making reality the latest HTML5 APIs.
While helping in the redesign of Signum’s website I took a look at Google Maps. It’s been almost 2 years since I last used the API for my end career project.
Now I wanted to know if I could make use of geolocalization and directions to show a visitor the way to get to our headquarters from wherever he/she is, instead of just showing with a marker where we are. Thanks to geolocation we can find out with precision the position coordinates of the visitor. 
View demo
I have already started to use different HTML5 features to progressive enhance web applications developed in my current job. HTML5 has a good thing: users with modern browsers can enjoy enhancements without harming those who use older ones. This allows you integrate new features provided by HTML5 and don’t worry about incompatibilities.