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In 1984 and for a few years thereafter, Microsoft got its hands dirty in graphical computing by producing a few surprisingly mediocre applications for Macintosh, starting with a port of its otherwise decent spreadsheet called Multiplan. By the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, many of us felt the company would never again premiere a software concept on a machine bearing an Apple logo.

Sometimes I have a lot of fun being proven wrong. In the company's first major demonstration in decades that one of its major software products need not be leveraged upon Windows, this morning Microsoft took the wraps off its latest Dynamics CRM for Mobile. And although it promises to provide native apps for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Android starting in Q2, there's no escaping the fact that the headline attraction has all the earmarks of iPad. It's the device that CxOs want, and therefore it's the one that any business software platform must target.

The short answer might be no, as a number of website developers are beginning to think in terms of extending the core web apps to better handle mobile devices, such as iPads and other tablets. This flies in the face of current trends, so let's consider the pros and cons.

"We deal with all sorts of customers," says Amir Shah, the CEO of St. Louis-based Web developer AgilitySpeaks.com. "I find that when we introduce them to 'mobile' the first thing they think about, and usually the only thing they think about, is an app." But developing an app dedicated to tablets means forking into two or more different processes, and that can be complex and costly.

It isn't easy to make the case that a product and a technology are mutually dependent and inseparable, in the same paragraph with a statement that you're going to be separating them for the benefit of both. This afternoon, Adobe is giving it one heck of a try, in a blog post that fully confirms what my friend and colleague at ZDNet, Jason Perlow, first reported at midnight last night: Adobe is parting ways with Flash Player for mobile devices, in the first move of what could eventually spell complete obsolescence for the venerable plug-in.

As anybody who lives in or near a major city knows, parking tickets can be a massive and seemingly unavoidable headache. However diligent one is, it seems there's always a confusingly-worded sign or aggressive meter maid waiting to spoil your day. Even if a ticket is unjustified, fighting it can turn into a whole new ordeal.

It's with this bitter pain point in mind that a handful of startups are building mobile apps to help drivers combat parking tickets and the city parking enforcement agencies that dole them out. Eff the PPA is one such app, which took home the top prize recently at Philly Startup Weekend, a hackathon during which small teams launch a startup in 54 hours.

Despite having been generally available for mobile systems like iOS for over two-and-a-half years now, you don't hear much about something called the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP). That may change soon, as a new set of mobile apps for human resources professionals, developed in conjunction with Sybase's parent company SAP, are demonstrating an emerging pathway for other developers to develop custom enterprise apps in the same vain.

If you think recently-unveiled products like the Facebook Timeline and Amazon's cloud-powered Silk Web browser have raised privacy issues, an innovation that lies just around the corner could blow them both out of the water.

Facial recognition technology has been around for decades, but until recently it's been slow, inefficient and largely limited to proprietary implementations, such as databases used by law enforcement. That could all be about to change, and the results are bound to send shivers down the spines of digital privacy advocates.

Trover, a photo-driven app for exploring places, has launched out of private beta. Trover lets users share location-tagged photos and browse them by time and location.

Though Trover is a photo-sharing app, it is organized for exploration, not just for browsing images. Don't think Instagram; Trover's roots within Seattle-based travel startup Travelpost are apparent. Trover shows what's around you to help you explore the place.

Today, mobile application development vendor appMobi launched a new 1-Click payment technology called cloudKey which secures users' credit card information for online purchases on their device, not on remote servers. With the wave of recent high-profile hacking attacks on companies like Sony, Citi and AT&T, even non-security minded folks have become aware of the need for improvements to the current system.

Until now, credit card accounts and personal information have been stored in centralized, online databases, making them vulnerable to attacks. With the new cloudKey system, which uses standard encryption technology and a "distributed key" topology, appMobi aims to deliver a more secure solution.

Tango, a cross-platform mobile video calling startup, is today announcing its first expansion to a non-mobile platform: the Windows desktop. Sometime later this summer, the new PC software will debut, joining Android (phone and tablets) and iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) as the third major platform launch for the company over the past nine months.

New from a company called Clever Sense is an app called Alfred (iTunes link) that provides personalized recommendations for restaurants, coffee shops, nightlife, bars and clubs, and soon, hotels, salons, spas, shops, attractions and more. The interesting thing about how the app does so is the technology it is uses behind the scenes. Instead of relying primarily on collaborative filtering, a technique found at sites like Netflix and Amazon ("people who like this also like that"), Alfred uses model-based learning, a type of artificial intelligence.

In Alfred's case, the app uses its smarts to understand the way that people talk about places, and then creates personalized interest graphs that grow and change with each action a user takes and each decision they make.