Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
They've gone by many names -- "programs," "executables" and "applications" -- and the development of technologies such as HTML5 calls their nature into question. But the explosion of apps that have set the mobile device market alight over the past several years have been around for almost as long as digital computing has. Disagree with that statement whilst chatting with those who took early programming classes, and you may be staring down a punch card to the face.
In terms of consumer technology, though, apps have migrated from PCs to video game con
