Mobile developers, its time to fire up the Android SDK Manager and hit those two buttons that say “Install 12 packages” and “Delete 6 packages” to update the Android SDK to revision 17.

Headlining the changes is the ability to use hardware acceleration for x86 system images with the Android emulator, and the many updates to Lint.

The full list of changes can be found in the announcement.

Microsoft has shown glimpses of how enterprise-class applications would look when Metro-ised for Windows 8. I can’t say I’m convinced by them; they look good as mock-ups, but information-heavy application designers are really going to be tested to distill their applications down into the Metro way.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading this fantastic war story from Opera’s Hallvord Steen as he debugged his way through Google Maps’ twisted, minified, and obfuscated JavaScript.

As someone who has looked into that abyss before, my hat’s off.