Apple doesn't exactly make it easy to use iOS devices on Windows and one complication is how you can cast your iOS device to a Windows screen. This is useful for presentations or screen captures that I often do and in the past i've gone through a number of shady tools that have come and gone. Recently ran into 5KPlayer which is a nice video player that as a bonus acts as an AirPlay server and makes short work of casting iOS content to Windows

When building Cordova apps for iOS you need to be prepared to deal with external links that you might want to open outside of the WebView control. By default any 'external' links routed to an href target or window.open() call are still opened in the same WebView rather than externally in Safari or whatever the default browser is. This often is a problem since there's no way to navigate back to your initial content. In this post I describe the problem and how to use a plug-in to work around what should be native behavior in any WebView control.

Looks like my "Taming Mobile Apps with Cordova and Visual Studio" article went live recently. If you want to find out how to use the new and pretty awesome Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova for building Web based, hybrid Mobile apps, this article is a great starting point. The article gives an overview of Cordova and then walks through examples with special focus on building iOS apps.

Apache Cordova is a hybrid mobile toolset to build Mobile applications using Web Technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Microsoft recently released a preview of its toolset for building Cordova applications with Visual Studio. In this article Rick takes a look at the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova for building, debugging and running iOS mobile applications from Windows by way of an example that takes an existing mobile Web AlbumViewer app and porting it to Cordova.

The Mobile Web has come a long way to provide the abillity to create rich UI and interactive, immersive and smooth Web based mobile applications. But there are still big gaps between mobile device features and what's available to Web developers when interacting with mobile devices. In this post I cover and contrast what's wrong with mobile Web development today and where I hope we are going, going forward.