There's a very interesting presentation from Alan Cooper at Agile2008 here - I'd encourage you to go and read it. In the past (particularly when reading The Inmates Are Taking Over The Asylum) I've been *really annoyed* by Alan - in particular with his view that developers are inherently incapable of undertaking interaction design, in quotes like

"[Programmers] struggle with this idea of making computers behave more like humans, because they see humans as weak and imperfect computing devices."

But I'm finding a lot I like in this presentation; maybe I've misunderstood him in the past, maybe he's mellowed or changed his mind:

"While interaction designers are pretty good at inventing user interfaces, lots of programmers and product managers are good at that, too."

I need to read it a few times and mull it over before I can give an impression of the whole, but there's some bits which get my bulb percolating:

1. The approach around slide 37, breaking product development into 4 stages, with the middle two (design/engineering) as agile, others as not. This implies iteration and change occurs in defined periods, not all the way through product development;
2. Slides on cognitive bias (as a driver for observing users, not just asking them what they want) reminded me of Duncan Pierce's skit on the subject at last years XP Day;
3. And the engineering phase sounds eerily like a development equivalent to the sketching which Mr Buxton advocates:

"You are going to write it twice anyway, whether the discarded first one is in tiny parts or one big chunk, so you might as well make the first time count for the max.   Brooks says that we will do things twice. I say we should acknowledge this truth and maximize the first time for understanding, and maximize the second time for efficiency."

I liked this quote:

"Startups should “intelligently hedge their bets across multiple platforms,” advised Richard Wong of Accel Partners. His firm has invested in mobile games and application site GetJar, “the store for the other 3 billion phones that aren’t iPhones,” as Mr. Wong put it."

+1 +1 +1

iPhone's doing a great job of getting the internet industry interested in mobile - particularly the US internet folks who've lagged behind slightly. And with the iPod Apple have a track record of entering a consumer electronics industry already carved up by incumbents (Sony Walkman anyone) and dominating, so Nokia et al can't exactly rest on their laurels.

But the idea that reaching the iPhone today gets you more than a visible, vocal, yet miniscule audience is a bit off-base. There are definitely places where it's worth putting the effort in to support it (just as there are places where it makes sense to do Symbian/Series 60 native apps), but not everywhere, not yet.

And as for the Loopt idea of using iPhone as a proving ground: it'll definitely make a fantastic demonstration (if you do it right). That said, iPhone native apps aren't cheap and simple to produce (and you can't even talk about why that is), and going straight in to support a device with large screen and fantastic UI means you're left with solving all those nasty little mobile problems when you do decide to go mass market and move beyond that single, lovely device...

Things will be quiet here for a little while. I'm now on 2 weeks holiday. Week 1 will be spent in Chester at the BAF Summer School, as is my wont. Week 2 I'm in Brighton recovering...

Nokia Conversations on location services:

"Fact is, location-based services (LBS) aren't a hollow promise anymore, with the proliferation of GPS, advanced mapping and fast mobile Internet connection speeds."

To my mind, it's the loosening of the operators grip on location data which has led to a growth in LBS applications over the last year. This has happened in a few ways:

1. GPS is commoditising, just like cameras did. It moves control over location data from the operator to the customer (not a bad thing in itself), and removes the pricing structures (10p per-lookup here in the UK) which operators levied before;
2. Lots of organisations (most visibly Google and Apple) are doing just-good-enough LBS using cell IDs, building their own cell-ID-to-location databases. Again - the operator is routed around in this world; they might have access to more accurate location of their customers, but the price for this incremental accuracy is evidently not worth the price being charged for it;

After a few months using an iPhone or an N82, the idea of a static map which can't tell you where you are already seems oddly quaint.

Fraser Spiers on slow responses from the iPhone App Store: "If Apple can’t guarantee a maximum 24 hour review process, they should drop it."

I completely agree that this is a really important issue. One of the things I loved about even a jailbroken iPhone is the installer app, which is the best experience I've ever had of downloading and upgrading applications on a mobile device. No settings, no WAP Push, no security prompts, no portals to wade through: lovely.

But you don't have to be faster than the tiger, you just have to be faster than the other guy... and it would be difficult for Apple to be slower than incumbent mobile telcos. We've done a lot of work with them over the years.

One of our clients has a very profitable mobile service. They've been in the process of getting on-portal with one large UK operator for *four years*. That's not "trying to find the right person to talk to" or "pitching the idea in", but rather "yes, we love your content, let's get it on there"... and then the wading through molasses of departments, reorgs, and so on.