I'm a little behind on writing up some launches, including some work we've been doing over the last few months for UK startup Touchnote.

I met the Touchnote team at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this February. Unfortunately for them, it was the day after the Swedish Beers party and I wasn't capable of much more than the odd shiver and groan, but we kept in touch and a couple of months later they asked FP to do a little review of their mobile products to date. We spent a few days on this, then a few weeks later had a call out of the blue from them: did we have any experience working with Microsoft tools? And would we be interested in helping them get their product onto the upcoming Windows Phone 7?

As it happened, a couple of our dev team had worked on XBox games and done some work with Blender in previous lives, so we had more than a passing familiarity with The Microsoft Way. Time was, as ever, tight, and so we kicked off simultaneous design and development efforts.

One of the big problems Touchnote face is that prospective customers think their product is "just another digital postcard service" - i.e. don't understand that it's all about real-world, physical cards being posted. So we made a point throughout the UI of emphasising that a real postcard is being built up: after selecting their photo from their on-phone gallery the user is presented with a preview of how the printed card front will look. We then flip to the back so they can fill out the fields as they would in the real world: writing a message, signing it, adding an address to send it to — all performed on the card's reverse before presenting a final preview of the front and back.

Colours were mostly dictated by Touchnote's (existing) brand, but combined these with a more natural paper-esque off-white - again, to emphasise that the user is creating a real postcard.

It was fun to explore what could and couldn't be done with WP7. It's so new that we couldn't just look at other apps to see what did and didn't work - aside from a few metaphors at the OS level, it's all up for grabs. So we were trying things out, seeing what happened and using/tweaking/throwing out as appropriate. Could we use images in the panorama header? How could we best transition users from one screen to the next? How should the back button function in various places? To a great extent, we answered these questions through trial and error, bouncing ideas between developers and designer.

We pared back the process of creating a postcard into key stages: Photo, Message, Recipient(s), and Preview, then developed a series of icons to clearly depict where the user is in the process without the need to use words (which also made it a lot easier when it came to internationalisation - the product is currently available in 8 languages). We used these icons both as an indicator and a navigation tool, so whilst you're being gently guided through the process, you can also skip around if you want to.

Meanwhile, our dev team tackled the two largest risks we could identify: getting integrated with the Touchnote back-end, and a WP7 app running. As the design effort proceeded, they put together a stub application: no user interface so a little ugly, but just enough to take a photo, post it to Touchnote and trigger the sending of a postcard. This was incredibly valuable: our first stub app taught us how to do threading properly in WP7 and let us fiddle with all sorts of parameters and networking code without having to wade through a user-friendly UI on every test cycle.

As expected nowadays in mobile, we ended up spending most of our time on UI and its polish. Early experiments with the panoramic parallax effect which characterises WP7 highlighted some unexpected limitations to do with maximum panorama widths, so there was a fair bit of back-and-forth between design and development as we dealt with this, learned about the types of animation that WP7 offered, and so on. We found the animation side of things quite straightforward - we found a couple of hours of noodling was all it took to get to grips with Silverlight - and similar in principle to the iPhone; in fact our early feelings were that on the surface of both the device and the SDK, WP7 is similar to the jabscreen.

Other parts of the SDK which impressed us were the isolated application storage (good for bulk storage of data) and the by-name object storage, which serialises C# objects for you - very handy. Less fun was dealing with the tombstoning (assuming that your app might shut down at any second), but hey, this is mobile and we expect to be doing something strange to handle limitations of battery life and processor.

After some UX reviews internally, with Touchnote, and from the team at Microsoft, we took a bit of time to add some polish: updating the tile image for the Touchnote app icon to have the background of the last postcard you sent, and adding "finger signatures", to let you scrawl a little image which gets printed at the end of your message.

Testing presented a few challenges; no devices were available at the start of the project, and whilst emulator tools were quite reasonable, they weren't sufficient to let us simulate multi-touch UI. Prototype hardware arrived about half-way through the project, and then left the building again when we were burgled :( In general the prototypes were quite decent - a few device-specific problems were noted on them, particularly around rendering of gradients in image files. Compared to some we've seen (and we have a great deal of experience with prototype hardware) they were solid.

The Touchnote APIs also proved solid enough for us to work with, though with the common caveat that they weren't designed with the triggering of edge cases for test purposes in mind. There was a worrying incident which involved all the Touchnote servers becoming clam-obsessed, but I'm sworn to secrecy on that.

The tooling was broadly good (the debugging tools garnered particular praise), though frequent releases of dev kits meant downtime reinstalling them; documentation was of variable quality and APIs changed over time (early releases let you add elements to Hashtable, but not remove them). The support we received from Microsoft, on the other hand, was consistently phenomenal: Paul Foster, their Developer Evangelist, routinely went above and beyond the call of duty in supporting our effort. We've never had such good support from an individual at an OEM.

Microsoft haven't had the best track record trying to crack mobile, and there's still a great deal of work for them to do to make WP7 a commercial success, but we were pleasantly surprised by our experiences launching Touchnote onto the platform - and we're proud of the product. You can watch a review of it here ("pretty damn good"), or read this really nice thing that Raam Thakrar, the CEO of Touchnote, said to get his children back:

"Working with Future Platforms was really good. We'd had some pretty mixed experiences in the past with offsite development - and Tom and co have completely bucked that trend. They were fantastically easy to work with, came out with a great product, and really were key in our WIndows Phone app. We're really happy with their work - and I'd whole-heartedly recommend working with these guys.

The process of working with FP was really refreshing - they knew how to manage us (with kid gloves when necessary!), giving the clearest guidance we possibly could. This made a very welcome change. They were flexible as well as being transparent - and that only served to delivering a great final product."

• The story behind Vogue's iPad app: "It has been much more work and much more complex to build and create it and work out what we were doing than I expected";
• Dead Drops: "an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am 'injecting' USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space";
• History in the Unmaking: "Thanks to archivists around the world, photos of past times and places are making their way to Google Earth through the historical imagery feature. Once enabled, you can scroll back and forth through time to make and unmake history with your fingertips";
• John Sculley On Steve Jobs, a surprisingly humble take on things that's been doing the rounds recently;
• Twitter and The Apprentice – some quick observations, some really interesting analysis (and pointers to data sources) for live audience reactions to TV programming;
• Smart < feature phones = the unbalanced equation: "Smartphones get all the media attention, but it’s feature phones that are still driving the mobile industry";
• How To Live Forever! Or Why Habits Are A Curse: "...time goes faster as you get older, but this is because, as a general rule, by the time we are older, we have settled in on the story lines and narrative arcs by which we structure our lives. We sign on as wife, potter, architect, bar tender, business person, or whatever, and so our lives are governed by time- and event- structures (shifts, projects, pregnancies, etc.) that have nothing to do with biological or physical time. ";
• Interesting stats from the Ovi store;
• Groupon's Development Philosophy: Really Short Iterations: "In support of this practice of short iterations delivered to production quickly, Pelletier said that Groupon does "lots of automated testing and all of the things you'd expect to make [it] safe and possible to do.""
• Windsor and Maidenhead publishes linked spending data online: "The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead has staked a claim as the first local authority in the UK to publish open and linked data, in support of financial transparency."
• History Hackday: "There's a lot of our history out there for which the full story is split and spread across many archives and organisations, and to be told it needs to be pieced together"
• How much does it cost to develop an iPhone application?; some very interesting stats from one of the developers for Twitterific;
• A Stranger Calling To Say They Love You Isn’t Weird If You’re Paying For It: "or $15 a month ($10, if you’re willing sign up for an auto-reoccurring monthly bill), HeySweetheart will have a stranger (male or female, your choice) call you to tell you that they love you, miss you, think you’re special, or any other sweet nothing they can come up with on the spot. "
• 6 minute story: "a growing collection of stories written in six minutes or less"
• How do you motivate your small startup of 6 people to put in everything they have: "I've a small startup and we've hit an inflection point. And we need to put in everything we have to try to get to the next level. Stock options only do so much. What other strategies are there to keep people impassioned/motivated/working?"
• Neo-minimalism and the rise of the technomads: "I held a huge garage sale and sold a ton of my stuff, gave up my lease in Venice Beach, CA, packed up a suitcase and a backpack of stuff I might need, and put everything else in storage to be reconsidered at a later date. Then, I set out to travel the world for the rest of the year... You may be thinking that this is an easy thing for a young single dude to try out, but with a family it would be impossible. I should have mentioned that my wife is traveling with me. And my son. Who was just born this past March. "
• Burning Man's open source cell phone system could help save the world: "There are not too many places you can go where tens of thousands of people show up, all of them with cell phones, in a hostile physical environment – lots of heat and dust, with no power and no cell service"
• What to do when Scrum doesn't work, lovely presentation of real-world experience;
• Fork it!: " It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness"
• BERG on Patina: "the history of a product written into its skin."
• Managing UX participation in agile projects

Small pieces, loosely launched:

• LastMinute asked us to get them onto the Nokia N8, so we build a little widget to wrap their existing mobile site in UI goodness - and also bring in some of content from hotel blogs they manage.
• The Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies (which the now-defunct Mobile Web Best Practices Group I've been sitting in worked on for the last couple of years) have been published by the W3C as a Working Group Note.
• We designed and built the Touchnote app for Windows Phone 7, recently featured on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. I'm going to write a lot more about this soon... There's a review here though: "pretty damn good"
• Oh, and Roulette Cricket won another award: "Most Innovative New App" at Mobile App World;

(One in a line of blog posts that's sat in my TODO list for months)

I've written about gold cards before; they're our slightly less confident version of the fabled Google "20% time", and an opportunity for FPers to play, collaborate, learn, or scratch an itch. We try to push these days towards producing demonstrable (even if half-finished) products. At a bare minimum a gold card results in a short talk to the rest of the company on our planning days; most of them include demos.

This left us with a little pile of interesting bits and bobs: products in an indeterminate state, somewhere between "oooh it works" and "wow that's useful". Whilst we launched The Guardian Anywhere under the Future Platforms name, quite a few of these experiments are a little rougher... so we wanted to find a place where they could be released on an unsuspecting public without necessarily having the polish that we would prefer to be associated with our work.

Enter Fat Parrot, stage left. So avant garde that it doesn't even have a web site, it's a brand where we can stick stuff. Things you wouldn't normally put online; things you couldn't normally put online; things you shouldn't normally put online. Right now that's:

• Brain splatter, a shoot-yourself-in-the-head simulator;
• F1sh, a simple tile-matching game;
• Motion sensor, an Aliens-style, erm, motion sensor live wallpaper;
• Snappy Easter, a pleasantly blasphemous arcade game;
• Zombie vs Monkie, a dirt simple touch game;
• Poggle, an accelerometer-based puzzle game;

At the back of my mind when doing some of this stuff was the idea of topical games: that you might hear a news story in the morning, release a reskinned version of a game based on it within an hour or so, and have it available for a day or so. Deliberately disposable applications, designed to be "consumed like songs" as Mr Applesquid would put it. I think there's an interesting business to be done here, but unfortunately not in app stores that have week-long lead times for a launch...

Poggle had a fair bit more time put into it than the others - Tariq Tamuji, long time FP Guardian Of Quality, put it together and polished it over a period of a couple of months. We originally released it as a paid app (at a £0.99) price point, thinking that it might be an interesting commercial experiment; and I'm very glad we did this.

In the course of about a month, Poggle sold 5 copies, 3 of those were from us. This was absolutely shocking; I'd have expected it to have racked up a small percentage (maybe 1-5%) of the equivalent downloads we have from free products - so maybe a few tens, a hundred or so - and this was way worse than that... and means that we'll be very careful about recommending Android app sales as a route to revenue for our customers. I'm not claiming it's impossible to make money selling Android apps, or that no-one is doing it... just that it's tough. I'm glad we've learned this on our own time, and that the lesson wasn't one that a customer ended up paying for.

As an aside... I think it should be straightforward to model the size of the Android paid download opportunity by presuming that downloads follow a quite standard power law distribution and plotting individual apps along such a curve, to extrapolate figures. We know how many apps sell more than 250,000 units, how many sell 5-10,000 units, and so forth...

There was whooping. A man hollered. The air may or may not have been punched. An appalling cricket-related pun may have been deleted from the draft of this post.

Yes, last Friday we were passed news that Roulette Cricket, a product we launched earlier this year for the eponymous startup, won second place (and a not-to-be-sniffed-at 50,000 euros) in Vodafone Mobile Clicks, a high profile competition to find the best mobile Internet startup in Europe. Having put a great deal of thought and sweat into the app over the last 9 months, we're absolutely chuffed; and we think that some of the principles underlying the app (its use of live data and unashamedly humble attitude towards being used as a "second screen") are interesting ones that you'll see a lot more of in coming years.

There's a video which communicates some of the tension behind the final presentations and judging at PICNIC in Amsterdam here, and you can learn more about Roulette Cricket on their web site here, or in my blatherings here, or here.

And of course, congratulations to the RC team - who've propelled this product from paper plates at Lord's into the Apple App Store. If you had the patience to watch the talk I gave at MoMo Amsterdam a few weeks ago, you'll have seen me sing the praises of some clients who've been a wonderful mix of engaged and trusting this year. They're one of them, I'll be writing about one of the others soon :)