Xamarin came out with a landslide of updates. Their Mono for Android development tool was updated to version 4.2 packing new features. The most notable is the new Xamarin Designer, a visual drag-and-drop interface design tool. Mono for Android comes as a plugin for Visual Studio and Xamarin's own IDE, Mono Develop. The latter also got updated, mainly focusing on C# code completion among other improvements.

2012 is the "International Year for Sustainable Energy for All". You can be part of it in several ways, e.g. by taking part in the "Green ICT Application Challenge" by the International Telecommunication Union. Maybe your app can bring about some positive change.

Tizen has grown up. It is not yet a full year old, but it is 1.0. The first proper version of the open-source mobile OS is called Larkspur and brings additional features of W3C/HTML5 specification, support for POI and route search and Wi-Fi Direct key features. SDK and source code are available now.

Developers are invited to participate in the Eclipse Community Survey. The annual survey aims to document the requirements and trends within the Eclipse developer community. Respondents can win Eclipse shirts or a pass to EclipseCon Europe or EclipseCon North America.

Nowadays, a lot of native apps are relying on a remote server as data source. Creating Apps member Alex Leutgöb has provided us with a short wiki article on how to synchronize remote data within apps, including pseudo code.

9 out of 10 mobile phone users think it is important to know when their personal information is being shared by an app and to be able to turn this off or on. This is one of the reasons the GSMA has announced an initiative for mobile app privacy, bringing about detailed guidelines.

If you develop mobile applications for markets with a large share of low-end devices, this tutorial by Creating Apps member Srdan Dakic could come in quite handy for you. He shares his experience on how to pull existing documents and images from a Joomla-based web site and "squeezing" them into small, constrained devices.

Only 5 per cent of all mobile apps have a Privacy Policy. Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General at the California Department of Justice aims to change that. She brought together Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft and RIM - and all of them have agreed to work towards that goal. Reaching it would be an important first step in the fight for user privacy. Developers and ecosystem owners should make sure to fight with and not against the users.

Valentine's Day is kind of strange. It seems that everyone, girls and guys equally, like to talk badly about it, how useless and tacky it was and that it was invented by the flower industry to make you spend all your hard-earned mobile app cash on flowers. But once it's there, you can hardly ignore it, there is some kind of restlessness in the air. Some people have tried their best to make that special somebody feel really special. For Kaitlyn Trigger, the effort was as big as to learn how to code and put up a whole service online. She developed Lovestagram as a nerdy-geeky Valentine's Day gift for her boyfriend - none other than Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

The recent Path incident brought up the topic privacy in social apps once again. Apparently, Path is (was) not the only one messing around with users' phone books. If you did the same, there are pre-texted we-are-sorry-letters available on the net. If you did not, but want to connect your users, you might consider hashing.

Motorola announced today, it will sell the RAZR in a Developer Edition with unlocked bootloader. If you are EU-based, you can pre-order it already. US developers will have to wait a little longer.

Chupa Mobile is a new market for mobile components such as utilities, libraries, UI elements and more. It offers components for different operating systems. Developers can sell their own components on Chupa Mobile. To attract them, the company started a contest, giving away $10,000 (€7,900) - in cash and as vouchers.

This thing is small and consumes little power but offers a whole lot of possibilities for developers. The fully functional computer plays 1080p video and offers quite a few interfaces, including HDMI, USB, E-SATA and Ethernet to name a few. The CuBox runs Android 2.2 as well as Linux OS as a media center, while being just 5x5 centimeters small.

Got an idea? Want to turn it into a mobile app? Great, but be aware of the road that lays ahead of you. Frédéric Descamps has packed the journey into a flowchart and did so in an exhilarating way. We loved the graphic and would not want to keep it from you.

HP has announced to contribute webOS to the open source community. After shutting down all device production, rumors came up that HP would be looking to sell the OS. The open source solution nourishes hopes for an afterlife of HP's mobile OS even more, as it was also announced that devices by third party manufacturers might come in the future, if the OS gains in popularity under the open source license.