A nice little webapp is highlighted on Lifehacker this morning.
You want an Android phone, but that’s the only thing you know for sure. Which phones have physical keyboards, decent cameras, and are available on your carrier, or unlocked? Webapp Droidthing provides a toggle-switched comparison of all your Android phone options.
Speckyboy Design Magazine has a great collection of emulators to test apps and sites for iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Palm operating systems. I’m going to have to grab these and start playing…
I’ll summarize Paul Carr’s piece at TechCrunch with this simple statement – just because the iPad is a cool device, that doesn’t mean it’s a great device for reading. Quite the opposite, in his view. The whiz-bang features of the device make the Kindle (and other e-readers) look positively ancient. However, the interface and features actually detract for a fulfilling reading experience. Best paragraph of the piece:
The iPad is emphatically not a serious readers’ device: the only people who would genuinely consider it a Kindle killer are those for whom the idea of reading for pleasure died years ago; if it was ever alive. The people who will spout bullshit like “I read on screen all day” when what they really mean is “I read the first three paragraphs of the New York Times article I saw linked on Twitter before retweeting it; and then I repeat that process for the next eight hours while pretending to work.” That’s reading in the way that rubbing against women on the subway is sex.
This is an interesting thought from Kevin C. Tofel at GigaOm. With Palm’s fortunes looking increasingly iffy, they are reportedly looking for a buyer. Kevin posits this thought: What if HTC bought Palm? He makes some good points about why this would be a good move for all involved, although I’m not sure if Android and Palm’s WebOS would benefit equally in this arrangement. HTC has been doing some excellent work building hardware for Google’s phone OS (watch for the Incredible to be added to the Verizon lineup later this month) and WebOS is a strong alternative. It could be very interesting.
Typography
From the always-excellent Smashing Magazine, here are some great tips for CSS newbies and experienced hacks like me alike.
The tips are grouped into these categories:
Internet Explorer 6 continues to be the bane of a web developers existence. It is a major virus gateway for your computer, and with it’s goofy implementation of HTML and CSS and the DOM, it makes it hard to build the kind of sites that users enjoy, uh, using. Why won’t this madness end? Craig Buckler offers a few reasons:
- IE7 and IE8 can only be installed on Windows XP SP2+ or Vista. Many people continue to use older versions of Windows or avoid automatic updates.
- Many large corporations have legacy applications that only support IE6. Upgrading these systems incurs significant costs which may not be justifiable – especially in the current economic climate. As a result, their employees have been unable to switch to alternative browsers.
- Many IT novices are ignorant of what a browser is, how to upgrade, or why they should.
- Some users simply prefer IE6 to IE7 and the competing browsers.
Please. This technology is eight years old. MS, can’t you try to nudge people along a bit? The web dev community would heap praises upon you, showering you with candy and flowers. And I think we might even be able to arrange for 72 virgins upon your entry into heaven. Whaddaya say? Is it a deal?
Susan Weinschenk, author of Neuro Web Design (a great read, btw), has a great little post about research into online herd shopping behavior done by Yi-Fen Chen.
Four studies were done, each with a pair of similar holiday traveling books to choose from. Each study displayed the popularity of each book differently; one with star ratings, one with sales volume, and two with variations of consumer recommendations vs. expert recommendations. Here’s what happened:
And in the fourth study, Chen tested a recommender system, (“Customers who bought this book also bought”) vs. the recommendation of the website owner, (“Our Internet bookstore staff strongly recommends that you buy…”) People followed the recommendation of the website owner 75% of the time, but they followed the recommender system 88.4% of the time.
Good post at Smashing Magazine this morning. The first 10 of 25 Web Design trends they’re tracking. Part two comes next week. They provide some excellent examples of each trend as well.
Here’s their top ten:
The good folks at Gizmodo pass along a video of multitouch working on a G1 running Android. It’s not perfect, but certainly usable. Nice work! Gizmodo says,
Like we’ve said before, Android really is quite promising. And I, for one, can’t wait until it’s done cooking (or at least until everyone stops fearing Apple’s multitouch patents). For those with G1s interested in duplicating this demo, Hutch has provided all of his software with full instructions on his site.
I’d agree. Great to see this progress. With news of Motorola and HTC coming out with Android-based phones this year, we’re looking at an exciting year for the little open source mobile OS.
Josh Cantone looks at the phenomenom of platform fatigue. I was thinking about this very subject today while looking through a disorganized list of AIR apps. It’s nice to see people contributing, but how many Twitter apps do we need? There’s good stuff out there, but without a well thought out delivery system, the truly innovative projects might get lost.
This is what happened to Facebook. When the platform launched, there was a huge amount of buzz around the potential for advertisers and app developers. Subsequently, a huge number of applications were created on the platform and users were faced with a rising tide of apps that demanded their attention. End result: app fatigue. We started seeing app fatigue set in less than a year after the platform’s launch when there were just over 15,000 total applications — there are now over 53,000 apps on the Facebook platform, according to Adomonics.