• Jakob gets his iPhone on: "The difference between iPhone apps and desktop apps is that, with the former, these UI guidelines are much more critical because mobile typically implies intermittent use. Thus, the initial hurdles must be very low and easy to jump or users will never get accustomed to using your app."
• A nightmarish vision of an ad-supported future in an Augmented Reality stylee. Hopefully so OTT that it couldn't happen, though I can't work out which bit I found more horrifying: the relentless commercialism, the fact that tea-making will need instructions, or the implied laziness of the "look inside your fridge from 3 feet away" feature... horribly beautiful, whatever.
• Sleep Cycle, the Nike+ for sleeping. I think we're going to see so many more of these things soon, as we start to get more comfortable with, and interested in, recording and analysing our own behaviour. I did a little talk which touched on this this last year, subtitled "the interplay between apps and society".
• Want to build a mobile app? Here's how to convince the CFO, a piece discussing budgets and justifications for working on (predominately iPhone) apps. Basically a good article, despite lines like "The cost of making an app is going to vary a lot depending on what kind of an app it is" - completely true, but not that helpful...
• Comparisons of iPhone and Android behaviour from Flurry. In summary: the platforms are very similar on app retention, session frequency, and session length. The number of new Android apps is growing steadily month-on-month; the number of iPhone apps was flattening until the iPad announcement, at which point it exploded. iPhone still has way many more new apps coming out.
• Gameloft has published its revenue figures for 2009, and breaks out iPhone revenue: c$170m total, of which $25m was iPhone. Time for Nintendo to get worried?
• Helen has a nice piece about Motorola dominating mobile in the US (or Blackberry, if you just want to consider smartphones). Change is certainly afoot, but if you're launching services today which need a wide audience, then Android and iPhone aren't (yet) the best route. According to the stats I've got in front of me, to get 50% of the UK mobile audience you'll need to go to about 30 different device families, thereby targeting 230 actual devices: fragmentation hasn't gone anywhere.
• Facebook launches XMPP support; I know it's a fairly techie detail, but I think this is really significant. The largest social network out there has just opened up its chat client to all sorts of third parties. What will this do to Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger? And what sort of interesting third-party apps will we start see that hook into Facebook chat as a mechanism for messaging? If I want to reach my (non-techie) friends today, Facebook is certainly the best way to do so. I know that they've been talking about it for some time, but Facebook is really starting to look like a coherent platform...
• Interesting piece about the future of publishing, in the context of the iPad launch. With all the launch noise around publishers, the iPad seems to be acknowledging the incumbents, but it's unlikely to let them play the game in the manner they've been accustomed to. Nice perspective from the article though, which really reminds me of some of the things I've heard coming from Puzzler over the years: "In other words, in the ever-burgeoning universe of media overload, content creators are battling for a user's time. If a book is a 20-hour call on one's attention, a magazine might be better defined as a bid for an hour or so of the consumer's day. "If we think of magazines as an intermediate form -- a read that can last several hours -- it has a tremendous future," Kelly says. "We've just begun to explore what it can do.""
• Oh, and I thought the Google search commercial was absolutely gorgeous.

Networks are at breaking point, says company providing alternative means for mobile devices to get online. Bear with me whilst I haphazardly tie this news item with another recent piece of fare, the iPad launch. Small speculations, loosely coupled.

I'll bet that from a customers perspective the crappest bit of an iPhone - the bit that bugs you the most, that causes you the most grief and fails the most often - is the network. We read all sorts of complaints about AT&T in the US, and O2 have taken a bit of a hammering over here. That's understandable, in a way - no operator has an unblemished track record in customer service, and as the experience of a smart device improves, the networks increasingly fall into its shadow. Operators also get scant loyalty compared to the device manufacturers, and this has been the case since looong before Apple came along.

I thought one of the most interesting bits in the iPad launch was around the connectivity: there's no contract. It's a data-only device which will move pretty seamlessly between Wi-fi and 3G, and which involves no subscription or commitment to an operator, just a monthly payment.

I think it's quite well-known that most data usage takes place in the home or at work - both areas which are likely to have well-provisioned wi-fi. Where does this leave the poor old operator? They end up as the guys (and girls) providing the patchy network that gets used when nothing else is available, that's paid for only when it's used, and that generates zero loyalty or commitment from customers. That doesn't sound like a good place to be, but you can bet that once some operators start offering tariffs that support this model, others will feel pressure (from both customers and OEMs) to follow suit.

This feels to me like the start of a shift to operators as pipes. I'm avoiding labelling them "dumb pipes"; let's not pretend that doing this sort of thing properly, at scale, is easy. Someone has to master the black arts of radio planning, lease sites, own spectrum, do billing, keep the lights on and the routers humming... and as demand for mobile data grows this will get harder, not easier. I bet there are folks looking at bandwidth projections for 20 years' time right now, and gently soiling themselves.

Maybe there won't be room for 5 of these new "utility" style businesses in a single country (as we have here in the UK) and we'll see more consolidation; and maybe some of them will invest in Wi-fi infrastructure - through, perhaps, companies like The Cloud - themselves.

• Skunk Works rules of operation from Lockheed Martin;
• Kanban and Scrum - a practical guide; see his other pieces on making use of both and kick-starting kanban;
• Behind the scenes of Brutal Legend: "we both underestimated the total content push and, more importantly, didn't anticipate the huge content spike at the very end of production"
• The role of leaders on a self-organising team: "Self-organizing teams are not free from management control... Neither are they free from influence."
• Crystal Clear distilled: "The lead designer and two to seven other developers … in a large room or adjacent rooms, ... using such as whiteboards and flip charts, ... having easy access to expert users, ... distractions kept away, deliver running, tested, usable code to the users … every month or two (quarterly at worst), ... reflecting and adjusting their working conventions periodically."
• Mix the sizes of backlog items you commit to: "To avoid having multiple product backlog items wrapping up the last few days of the sprint, mix the size of the product backlog items you choose to bring into each sprint."
• Lessons learned from distributed scrums: "The following rules of thumb came about when I had to run teams of consultants where no one was in the same place and the places they were ranged from their office to their home or car, or airport lounge, or even their bed when they were in on the other side of the world."
• Best practices are dangerous when adopting agile: "If you think of the standard as the best you can do, it’s all over"
• The difference between motion and action: "He was confusing “the accounting” of the effort with achieving the goal. But Jim felt that since he was doing lots of motion, “lots of stuff was happening.” In reality we hadn’t gotten any closer to our goal than the day we hired him."

Stuff that doesn't fit into any particular category but just struck me as plain interesting:

• Consumerism heat maps: "...notice how the seller-heavy rural areas (yellow) are offloading their juno on the coast elites (red). What was the flow of crap to your neighborhood."
• An article about design considerations for long-term nuclear waste storage at Yucca Mountain;
• HP plans a trillion-sensor global stethoscope: "It means they can detect and respond to flutters as well as shakes. That implies they can be used to better monitor the status of buildings and bridges, fault zones in the earth, mining operations and volcanoes. In fact, any application where detecting microscopically small vibration events or patterns is important."

• The forgotten layer of the test automation pyramid: "Service-level testing is about testing the services of an application separately from its user interface. So instead of running a dozen or so multiplication test cases through the calculator’s user interface, we instead perform those tests at the service level."
• Cucumber, a tool to help you describe BDD tests in English - we've got a team using this on a project at the moment, I'm very curious to learn how they've gotten on with it...
• Steve McConnell has updated his classic software mistakes list;
• Object-relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science;