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.
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.""