At MobileMonday London earlier this week we launched version 2.0 of The Guardian Anywhere, our free newsreader for the Guardian newspaper for Android phones. It's a big step forward for the product, in three ways:

1. We've addressed the main complaint that our customers had with the product, so content now downloads much faster. A full collection of all articles and photos now takes about 10 minutes, where previously we were seeing download times between 15 minutes and an hour. A refresh of the news can now take less than a minute.

2. You'll find two new significant features: Surprise Me, which (in a nod to the strangely compelling Guardian Roulette web-app) takes you to a random article; and Picks, which learns which articles you enjoy reading and makes suggestions for news you might like. You won't notice either of these features at first - Picks kicks in after you've read enough stories for it to start making useful recommendations, and Surprise Me is in the menu of the Picks tab. I'm particularly excited about Picks, because as far as I can see it's not available anywhere else: you can only get it with our app.

3. We've refreshed the whole user interface, thanks to the keen eye of Trevor "Pixel Hose" May. You should notice a much cleaner, more consistent look and feel across the whole product nowadays.
   

James Hugman, who wrote The Guardian Anywhere, gave a presentation at MoMo summarising the product and what we've learned building it. The full slides for his talk are online here, and there are a few points he made that I'd like to emphasise:

1. We dog-fooded this app at FP more than most other products we've worked on. This has made a difference; we've identified bugs, caught UI annoyances and missing features before the public has had a chance to.

2. The Android marketplace makes it easy for us to launch new versions of the app. The lack of an approval process cuts our time-to-launch from days or weeks down to minutes. This means we can get bug-fixes or features deployed fast, and react quickly to suggestions from our customers. This has changed the way we've worked on the product; we tend to launch small pieces often instead of large releases.

3. Fragmentation exists with Android, but just like iPhone, it's much less of a problem than it has been with J2ME. Guardian Anywhere currently support 4 different versions of the Android operating system and over 12 different devices. We have experienced some pain in doing this: the Hero, which uses Android 1.5, seems to give us a disproportionate number of problems and we've seen a small number of quite odd device-specific bugs elsewhere. For instance, our Nexus seems to have much worse network performance on certain wi-fi channels, and SQLite performance for indexing differs significantly between the Nexus and the Magic. These sorts of issues are quite rare, but they exist.
   

The application is free to download from the Android Marketplace. We'd love to hear what you think of it.

And if you're a publisher and you're looking for a fantastic reader application, do please get in touch. We're actively licensing this product at the moment.

Update: A few factual corrections: it was the Nexus causing problems with wireless channels, not the Magic; we've ported to more than 12 devices (23 according to Google Analytics).

Hmm, so the Nexus outsold the iPhone globally in February? This tweaked my scepticism gland, painfully. Especially as the articles is itself a quote from a fairly shallow piece elsewhere, which itself is a quote from one distributor of devices.

So this looks to me like one online trader of mobile devices noting a difference in iPhone and Nexus sales (fair enough, I'd imagine most iPhones are sold by Apple or operators)... being quoted by another site - and in the process their "16% more Nexuses sold in February" being misquoted as "Nexus Outsells iPhone Globally".

I'm fundamentally a fan of the Nexus (and I use one as my primary phone myself), but I've yet to meet someone who's actually paid for one. I love what Google are doing to seed them amongst developers, but it'd be really nice to see some Real People using one.

• Entertaining presentation on tactics to get into the App Store;
• The Register on Windows Phone 7 design: "If you don't have as much detail in the transition as you do in the state, you're going to get it wrong, Buxton said at Mix09.";
• Tufte waded in on W7 too, and quite sharply: "The WP7S screens look as if they were designed for a PP slide presentation or for a video demo ... and not for an handheld interface"
• Fisherprice launch iPhone Apps, no surprise given how the very young seem to take to touch UI... I hope we get to show off what we've been doing in this area one day.
• Interesting piece on how to think of success benchmarks for app launches;
• I'm a sucker for tech folklore and I'm old enough to remember Windows 2.0, so I loved this piece on the secret origin of Windows, the tale of how this beast actually got launched...
• Someone's leaked the iPhone developer agreement. Good.
• Apple have a new stance on off-the-shelf apps and launchers: they've got to do more than that. I'm simultaneously pleased to see the bar raised, and a bit worried that this class of app might be unavailable, when on other app stores they're pretty popular (8 million downloads of Facebook on GetJar, for instance);
• Lovely presentation on game design, game-like mechanics, and convergence. Well worth 20 minutes.

Consider Spring now cleaned. I'm off for a week of R&R, hiding out in a cottage in Devon with a pile of books and a copy of Eclipse. PleaseRobMe users please note I'm leaving Rosehill guarded by a brace of slack-bowelled lions and in the broadsword-wielding hands of @joh.

Via the WMLProgramming mailing list, see this bug report, and listen to the sound of an assumption creaking gently in the wind.

For quite some time now, folks in the mobile industry have been using the User-Agent HTTP header to identify devices, look up capabilities (using a device database like the WURFL), and deliver appropriate versions of content. Industry initiatives like transcoding which threaten the ability to do this have been met with a variety of flavours of opposition... but it looks like there's a new threat to this practice:

"The different User-Agents are an expected outcome of how Android works. Different parts of the Android system handle different actions.

The browser renders the various mark-up languages, but it will hand off to other applications to handle various file types. In the case of the video player, it uses the OpenCORE framework as you indicated to play video files where the source is HTTP."

Despite the problems such an approach might cause, it isn't actually wrong, either. RFC1945 defines a user agent as:

The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers, editors, spiders (web-traversing robots), or other end user tools.

So what happens now? Do we start expanding device databases to include not only browser user agents, but also those of individual applications on individual platforms - even presuming that we can distinguish different devices by the apps that run on them? Or do we use some other mechanism to determine device capabilities?

• Something about Teletext selling 300,000 iPhone apps makes me feel warm inside.
• The iPhone App Store ranking algorithm has been reverse-engineered: "The formula is 8 times the sales of the current day + 5 times the sales on the 2 proceeding days + 2 times the sales on initial date."
• Amazing article on alternatives to acceptance testing: "think of defects as coming from four sources: programmer errors, design errors, requirements errors, and systemic errors. When trying to eliminate defects, I look for practices that address these four causes."
• The Android Marketplace has its first public success story; one swallow doesn't make a summer of course, but I'd put money on this being the start of a something big. Err in fact technically I think I *have* put money on that.
• Stop delegating. I lean this way myself. I'm not sure it's as black-and-white as this article suggests and I don't think I get the balance right, but I liked the general thrust of it.
• Interface innovation from Microsoft; I was surprised at how gorgeous I found this booklet-style table. It's nice to think that there's room for new form factors. I should've learned that from the DS...
• Why big businesses launch apps, and how they can fit into a business strategy: "Natasha Lomas profiles a number of iPhone apps launched by businesses and talks to some of the execs involved to learn more about what they have done, and how it has worked for them"
• Fantastic voiceover work on this Nokia article covering conceptual design. Feels like watching a 70s childrens TV programme :)
• Werner Vogels of Amazon on working backwards: "Once we have gone through the process of creating the press release, faq, mockups, and user manuals, it is amazing how much clearer it is what you are planning to build"