"backbone" in Weblog

Web Designer Depot have published my predictions for 2011 alongside a bunch of my favourite designers. Here’s what I had to say, with bonus hyper-linky goodness.

If 2010 was the year that mobile came of age then 2011 will see it move into its own apartment next door to the desktop and start throwing wild parties. Having started as the younger, slightly neglected sibling it’s now on the verge of shouldering the desktop out of the way.

The industry (as articulated by Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures) is coming around to the idea that mobile could often be the primary platform for new apps. As web developers and designers we are in a great position to take advantage of this shift through infrastructure enhancements like HTML5 and Phone Gap, and frameworks like jQuery Mobile, Zepto and Backbone, along with a horde of others.

All of these are based on technologies we already know and can start working with today. Rather than clumsily reskinning our websites, 2011 will be the year we embrace the philosophy of mobile to produce context aware, task tailored, fundamentally handheld apps.