THE RANT ?

The propaganda / marketing that made Microsoft what it is today, is NOT different from Apple, except the I in products seems to be showing record profits.  The De Beers pricing does not seem to have slowed down the consumer from I and Mac future waste.  The De Beers philosophy has also encouraged tablet makers such as Samsung to continue producing expensive tabbies - why conquer the  tablet market with less greed when you can fold up shop like HP  (Do you recall the massive sell off of HP tablets for $100 ? and not one retail unit was available for sale in Edmonton).  The point is, tablet prices are obscene, making regular laptops an obvious economical choice for computing.  So was Steve Jobs correct in asserting that everyone will be using mobile devices (i.e. ipad), not desktops?

In the tablet market there are essentially two juxtaposed operating systems, neither of which are the same as the desktop/laptop arena.  Microsoft would like to change that by coming up the middle with Metro that is an OS for all computers big and small. However, for now consumers have to be content with pay lots for A or pay lots and lots for I.  With A you get openness and freedom to develop, while I allows for complete submission to perpetual payment (preferably with a locked in credit card).  Now common sense might dictate that open and free should supersede locked down and cost forever ... but not so, according to latest Apple profits.  This brings me to my complete lack of 'multi-national executive' intelligence - why is Samsung refusing to be the world leader in tablets?  They have the A operating system, a tablet hardware with specifications that surpass I, so why do they NOT want to sell millions and millions of tablets at attractive prices?  (which assumes current prices starting at $400 CDN are NOT very attractive)

THE OPPORTUNITY

Building educational content for the Internet needs to pay attention to shifts in enduser modus operandi.  If the web content is on a static page of fixed width, then how accessible will that content be as compared to a fluid width / responsive web theme, with respect to tablets and smaller devices ?

Currently, there are two strategies for addressing different devices with a LMS/CMS.  The first strategy is to have the LMS/CMS recognize different devices and apply specific themes to those devices; in practice this is two or three different themes to address desktop - tablet - phone.  The second strategy is to have one theme that will respond to each device and 'wrap' content to the screen size; thereby delivering a consistent look and feel for any size screen.  This second strategy usually requires CSS 3 capable web browser and the smaller screen size will look slightly different as navigation gets pushed into a different part of the screen.

If the second strategy is designed well with appropriate theme attributes, then website content can be one for all (just like Metro wishes to be).  Creating mobile apps to mimic a website seems almost irrelevant when endusers continue to utilize web browsers regardless of which computing device they are using.  Perhaps the logic is too simple when appshopping is more lucrative to mind shaping the consumer ?

So is your course tabletized ?

Ta