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While Angry Birds is still the top paid iPhone game, a game written by an eighth-grader has spent the last few days atop Apple's free charts.

Some months back, a friend suggested that if Nay liked his iPod touch so much, perhaps he should try his hand at programming for it. At first he tried the standard Objective-C programming tools, but found the learning curve a little steep. He tried another tool called GameSalad, but didn't like the results. In the end, he settled on the Corona tools from Ansca Mobile. Corona was easy to use, he said, and also let him write once and publish for both Apple and Android devices.

In mobile browsers, you need to be especially careful about using timers because of the battery consumption. If you need to use many high-frequency timers at the same time, try to manage them using only one timer that will launch different behaviors from the same process.

The first question we need to ask ourselves is, what happens when our web page goes to the background because the user switches focus to another application (in multitasking operating systems) or opens or browses to another tab or window? Another problem is what happens when the phone goes to sleep (because of the user’s inactivity while the script is executing). The behavior of timers can be a little tricky in these situations.Yet another problem is that timers execute on the same thread as the main script. If our script is taking too much processor time (a normal situation with large scripts on low- and mid-end devices), our timers will be delayed until some spare execution time is found.If we use a low frequency for the timer (for example, 10 milliseconds), the timer will generally have problems meeting the timetable.Remember that the JavaScript execution time depends a lot on the device hardware and the browser’s engine. Even if they’re running the same operating system, like Android, execution times can differ: for example, an HTC G1 will be much slower than a Nexus One with a 1-Ghz processor.

As shown in Figure 4, the real times are very different on different devices. On low- and mid-end devices, if they work at all, the result is far from our 200 ms intention—some low-end devices don’t even accept timers with a frequency of less than 1 second.

Want to write apps for OSX, the iPhone or the iPad? You can learn JavaScript and use a frameworks like PhoneGap or Titanium. Or you can learn the official language of Apple operating systems:  Objective-C. The debate over whether to build mobile apps in JavaScript or Objective-C is beyond the scope of this blog post. But if you want to learn Objective-C, these resources will get you started.

In the industry right now – as we see in the Social Media for Learning report research data – there is considerable use of social media tools in instruction delivery efforts. But there’s less evidence that people are using the tools to support social learning. Often, people use social media tools as another means of delivering content. For example: Publishing the training department newsletter on a blog uto-scheduling tweets about class assignments from a Twitter account that does not otherwise engage with the learners or ask them to engage with each other Hosting a software application development course, in tutorial format, on a wiki By contrast, using social media to support and extend social learning invites learners to contribute, engage, and participate with one another online. For instance, when: Setting up a wiki for those in a new-hire induction program to work together to edit a FAQs page for use by the next group coming to the program Having managers-in-training use a microblogging tool for a leadership book-club discussion Helping to support and participating in a community of the organization’s customer service reps, to give them a place to share war stories and strategies for dealing with challenges           So just using the online tools to deliver content doesn’t support “social learning;” that happens when you use the tools to invite interaction from and between the learners. It’s about social, not media, and it’s about shared learning, not just pushing content.

Adding a MOOC layer to a learning program or platform isn’t particularly original these days, as Blackboard and seemingly every player in this space scrambled to become MOOC-capable at about the same time as Instructure

The @Sweden program, known as Curators of Sweden, came about when the Swedish Institute and Visit Sweden, the government tourist agency, sought to develop a plan to present the country to the world on Twitter. They hired an advertising company, Volontaire.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

Google App Engine lets you run web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.