I guess everybody has their favourite Christmas cookies. Among mine are Vanillekipferl (How do you translate that? They're a sort of vanilla-flavoured crumbling cookies). So every year before Christmas, I humbly try to recreate that specific taste that I've grown up with. After trying a few different recipes from books, I eventually asked my mother for her recipe. With that, I'm getting closer but still don't quite match hers ...

The deal between Nokia and Microsoft is all over the news these days: Nokia abandoning its own smartphone OS and switching to a Microsoft OS instead? This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. And it brought back memories ...

Back in the late 1990s, I was working for a small software company that specialised in software for electronic organizers and the upcoming PDA market. Those were the days when the Palm Pilot was king. We made both software for synchronization (Windows only) and software that ran on these things - what you would call an "app" today.

Shortly after I started there, a couple of us were put on a top secret project: Nokia and Psion were working together on a new version of Nokia's "Communicator" smartphone line.