Steven Bradley on the importance of minimalism:

To master minimalist design means to master design. It’s harder to pull off because you can’t hide behind ornament and decoration.

All minimalist designs should not and do not look alike. Minimalism does not mean take everything away until only black text on a white background remains. It means communicating as much as possible with as few elements as possible.

None of this should be taken to mean that every design should end up being minimalist. Different design styles set different moods and invoke different emotions in your audience.

Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals you can add meaningful aesthetics on top. Ornamentation works when it has a solid foundation to sit on.

Drew Crawford provides in-depth analysis on the challenges with using Javascript in non-trivial mobile apps:

If we are going to make any progress on the mobile web, or on native apps, or really on anything at all–we need to have conversations that at least appear to have a plausible basis in facts of some kind–benchmarks, journals, quotes from compiler authors, whatever.  There have been enough HN comments about “I wrote a web app one time and it was fine”.  There has been enough bikeshedding about whether Facebook was right or wrong to choose HTML5 or native apps knowing what they would have known then what they could have known now. 

The task that remains for us is to quantify specifically how both the mobile web and the native ecosystem can get better, and then, you know, do something about it.  You know–what software developers do.