ReadWriteWeb

This week, Google+ enabled up to 50 people at a time to manage Google+ brand pages. Pages were a long-awaited feature after launch, but they only allowed individual administrators when they arrived. Since brand pages are how organizations manage their presence on Google+, many page owners need to give multiple team members the ability to edit and moderate.

Yesterday's update not only allows a large team to control the page, it allows transfer of ownership. So if one person created your page but someone else needs to be in charge of it, the creator can transfer that power. The Google+ interface is a little busy, so here's a step-by-step guide for how to change managers of a Google+ page.

After nine months of testing, a nifty tool called ifttt opened to the public last week. Don't worry; I'll save you the trouble. They tell me it's pronounced "Ift." Like "gift" with no G. Ifttt stands for "If this then that." It's a tool designed to "put the internet to work for you" by creating simple tasks using the Web's great services using the format "if this then that." It requires a simple yet fundamental kind of conditional thinking that can enable anyone to be programmer of sorts: "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox." You can make that happen with ifttt.

Well, great! The possibilities are endless! I want to automate everything! Where to begin? How about with some tasks that are important, not merely nifty? For instance, does posting your whole life into the cloudy ether ever make you worry about losing your data? Read on to learn how ifttt can back that stuff up for you automatically from behind the scenes.

A new report from Forrester focuses on the topic of building secure applications for the iPhone and iPad. Given iOS's popularity among enterprise and consumers alike, it's important for developers to understand the best practices for ensuring that mobile apps handle sensitive data appropriately. This is especially true when building apps for the financial sector.

But the finance and payments industry aren't the only ones who can benefit from a better understanding of security management - anyone building an app that handles customers' private data should be aware of iOS's data protection features and guidelines.

Mobile services company Urban Airship has compiled a white paper detailing the best practices for the implementation of push notifications in mobile apps. Push notifications, a feature on many mobile operating systems, allow app developers to send short messages to users via a badge update, sound or text-based alert. When used correctly, end users will engage more with the app, the brand, the organization or the service. And that leads to more opportunities for monetization, explains Urban Airship.

However, figuring out how to implement this feature wisely takes some work. The guidelines below may help.

Mobile Boilerplate 1.0 has just launched, providing developers with a trusted template for building mobile Web applications. The site provides templates and documentation that can help developers create cross-platform mobile Web applications which work on modern-day smartphones, but also offer fall-back support for older BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. The project itself is not a standalone framework, but works with jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, Phonegap and Appcelerator.

Michael Yuan of the medical-focused mobile company Ringful Health has submitted over 30 applications to multiple mobile application stores. It's what made him qualified to give a speech at this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas on the topic. His panel, "Tips on Getting Your Approved on App Stores," wasn't so much of a step-by-step guide for navigating the submission process, but more like a collection of things developers would want to know about the major application marketplaces. It probably wasn't the best title, considering the content presented, but the information itself was helpful to developers looking to learn a few more details about the different app stores out there.

Due to time constraints, Yuan's talk only focused on three mobile app store ecosystems: iTunes, Android (both the official Market and third-party efforts) and BlackBerry App World.

TestFlight, an iOS app beta testing service for mobile developers, recently launched out of its closed beta period and is now publicly available to all. Currently in an open beta, TestFlight offers a better way for developers to distribute iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) apps to testers via an over-the-air method. It's a vast improvement over the traditional testing process where, in the past, an end user would receive a zip file containing the app, unzip it, drag it into iTunes and then sync their mobile device with their computer.

Now, an app beta tester can simply tap a link sent to them on their phone and the app downloads directly to the device itself.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term for when everyday ordinary objects are connected to the Internet via microchips. It's a simple concept with big implications for how we interact with the world, deal with the resulting mass of data, live our lives and...get the mail?

IoT can be something as complex as smart power grids or something as simple as - as evidenced by the object-hacking folks over at Make Magazine - getting push notifications every time a letter arrives. That's right, it's "You've Got Mail" for the real world, via push notifications for your iPhone.

In December, we shared information about one of iOS's best-kept secrets: ad hoc distribution for mobile apps. The feature, intended for developers and enterprise use, was introduced in iOS 4.0 to allow developers to distribute mobile apps over-the-air to end users. In an enterprise scenario, the end users would be the company employees, but for consumer applications, the obvious target is beta testers.

Previously, beta testers had to download the test app to their computer, unzip the files, drag the app to iTunes and then sync their iPhone with iTunes. With the ad hoc method, installing an app is as easy as clicking a link.

But as it turns out, Apple's ad hoc method isn't the only solution out there.

Champagne and fireworks not your thing? Instead of partying it up this New Year's Eve weekend, why not take the time to do a little hacking instead?

Every so often, we like to feature a "weekend project" here on ReadWriteWeb. These generally consist of the kind of things you'll want to try out and play with when you have some free time, like over a weekend. Past projects have included things like hacking Nike+ for automatic Foursquare check-ins, a resource list on how to get started hacking Microsoft Kinect, experimenting with a customized, third-party version of Chrome OS called "Vanilla," and more.

This weekend, we've decided to round up a few resources detailing how to peek inside your mobile applications.