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Christmas is long gone and the Superbowl is over, which can only mean one thing - Valentine's day is almost here. If you are anything like the CloudSpokes team, you struggle to find a great gift for the love (or "like") in your life by February 14. It's not a secret that we're in love with developers, but we know as well as anyone that the developers in our life have their own unique likes.

Given that there is only one week left until Valentine's Day, we wanted to make shopping for the special developer in your life a little easier. Here is a list of gift ideas for the developer love (or "like") in your life, crowdsourced from our community team.

Apple really does not like it when you mess with its finely tuned systems. Especially when it is the company's cash cow iOS platform. In a short statement yesterday, Apple warned developers not to game the rankings system in its App Store, threatening the loss of Apple Developer Program membership to those who are found using services intended to artificially raise the profiles of their apps in Apple's store.

The great thing about being a Wall Street analyst is few people ever go back to check and see if the bold predictions you made months or even years ahead of time actually come true.

Still, a report released by IHS in the wake of Microsoft's earnings announcement last week is worth a closer look.

Someday, you may be able to view a Congressional hearing on your smartphone and then participate in the crowd-sourcing of questions for lawmakers and witnesses. The Congressional Hackathon held last month also envisioned a legislative process where constituents could read and comment on proposed laws, essentially particpating in a public mark-up process.

In the shorter term, Congress should release legislative data to allow third-party programmers to develop apps and better interfaces, according to recommendations made in a report released Tuesday about the first-ever Congressional Hackathon.

Mobile application developers unite! That is the theme for a new professional association that will launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. that intends to bring organizational support to mobile developers.

According to InfoWorld, the association is to be led by Jon Potter, the former executive director of the Digital Media Association. It is intended to promote mobile developer interests, collaboration, education, cloud hosting and governmental lobbying. Do mobile developers need their own guild?

Facebook has the most downloaded native application of all time. It also has perhaps the most visited mobile website of all time with nearly 350 million users and growing, using everything from basic feature phones to the smartest smartphones. It is available everywhere. The company started working on mobile solutions in 2006 and since then has grown with the times, using the tools available to them as they went along, from m.sites and WebKit touch interfaces to HTML5. Facebook's creed, really just a way to make their developers' lives easier, is to write once, run everywhere. This has been next to impossible.

Facebook mobile is predicated on browser technology. As Facebook's engineering manager Dave Fetterman says in the transcript below, the browser is what Facebook is good at, how it got where it is now and how it will iterate for the future of mobile. We will touch on the future tomorrow, but be sure to read Fetterman's presentation at Facebook's f8 developer conference below because it will inform what we are going to explore tomorrow morning. Really, how did Facebook design for all those platforms and devices?

IBM is poised to unleash its revamped mobile strategy with a full suite of tools aimed at providing enterprise developers with an end-to-end system for collaboration, development and management for mobile applications. IBM is putting the full weight of its history, tools and computing clout behind its mobile strategy. The company's comprehensive framework has the potential to be one of the most powerful end-to-end development environments available.

We have been studying what IBM is doing in the mobile realm for the last week as the company readies the push of its IBM Mobile Technology Preview. IBM is not going to push its tools and frameworks onto developers in one large product vertical but rather is taking an iterative, pragmatic approach to solving many of the mobile dilemmas that face enterprise developers today. We also interviewed Leigh Williamson, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and a member of the CTO Team for mobile software strategy development. Check out the transcript of our conversation below.

A temporary restraining order issued by a federal court in Albuquerque on behalf of a software company that produces a version of BASIC, has compelled Research In Motion to start calling the next version of its operating system for BlackBerry smartphones "BlackBerry 10." This according to a tweet from the company's official Twitter feed.

The name BBx (albeit with a small "x") is being used by Basis Software of Albuquerque as a trademark for its Business BASIC language interpreter, which is a classic language interpreter capable of extending business logic established over the previous decades to a platform that reaches smartphones, including BlackBerrys. Perhaps the most startling element of this case came from RIM, whose U.S.-based subsidiary had claimed in court, according to the judge's ruling, that the Singapore developers' conference to which the restraining order applies is not all that important to anyone in America.

HTML5 is fundamentally changing the way developers approach the Web. Whether it is for desktop browsers or mobile, the language and standards of the future are not some distant point on the horizon. It is right now.

In the mobile realm, the debate rages on: Web or Native? The difference between the two is beginning to blur as HTML5 standards evolve. We examine what happened in HTML5 in this year in our third installment of 2011's top trends. Check out the rest of the series, starting with John Paul Titlow's music trends and Alicia Eler's mobile commerce trends.

Today, Alpha Software has released version 11 of its Alpha Five tool. It helps developers build Web applications to solve a business problem once and make the app available on major platforms. Using Microsoft .NET and HTML5, Alpha Five enables developers to avoid Flash, Silverlight and other plugins that limit the compatibility of apps with major devices like the iPad.

Applications built with tools like Alpha Five will work the same on all your devices. The forms, dialogs and security features, as well as the calendars, video players and image galleries, are backed on the server side. Users won't have to worry about which device to use, and developers won't have to reinvent the wheel for each one.