I liked this nugget in Jakob Neilsen’s review of the ten best application UIs for the year.
“Although dedicated mobile apps are not yet good enough to win in their own right, it was striking how many of this year’s winners have a mobile component. Mobile is definitively the trend to watch for next year, and [...]
I agree with Michael Mace on this – the future of mobile innovation is web delivered applications. That in my mind is one of the really interesting things about the iPhone (aside from ruthless simplification and swishy motion fun); it’s a viable platform for delivering niche applications through a truly nice web browser.
“I think Web [...]
Riffing on the recent zooming UI launches, Carlo Longino thinks that the one of the basic questions related to the design of mobile applications is not giving people access to more, but giving them access to the right stuff.
“A common complaint about the mobile web is that it’s unattractive, or even useless, because of the [...]
Tom Hume writes that’s he’d like to see more task-specific mobile applications. I think he’s spot on. All the talk about the mobile web is using the wrong metaphor; the mass mobile computing experience is not going to involve surfing a web – it’s about doing atomic, simple, networked activities.
“Now this is a good example [...]
Gong & Tarasewich take design guidelines typically used for desktop applications and transform them for mobile applications. Short and clear.
“Design for multiple and dynamic contexts
Allow for single- or no-handed operation
Design for small devices
Design for limited and split attention
Design for speed and recovery
Design for ‘top-down’ interaction
Allow for personalization
Design for enjoyment”
Link: Guidelines for handheld mobile interface design [...]
“As ubiquitous computing technology migrates into the home environment, there has been a concurrent effort to allow users to build and customize such technologies to suit their own specific needs. Many tools have been built to enable users with little or no programming knowledge to build such applications. Despite the de-emphasis on programming, however, these [...]
Published by Gabriel White.