Tom Hume

• Lessons learned at Dropbox and Xobni, going from zero to a million users;
• Nice sample of a clean, easy-to-read contract;
• 157 app stats you need to know about;
• Three reminders about platform businesses, very clear and concise warnings;
• How I feel about downloading apps, ho ho. Android only I presume.
• MeeGo are having a conference in Dublin this November. I hope to be there...
• iAd may not be cost effective for developers; I'm really interested in learning how the production costs compare to response rates for these ads. I just don't get how they can be competitive with low-effort text and banner ads, if you're measuring responses;
• Why Smartphone adoption may not be as big as you think, decoupling adoption from growth rates;
• SquareUp looks interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing it in the wild;
• The Manifesto for Half-Arsed Software Development: "That is, while the items on the left sound nice in theory, we’re an enterprise company, and there’s no way we’re letting go of the items on the right.". I think you could apply most of this to businesses other than large enterprises, mind...
• Management lessons I learned at Apple, I found this extremely interesting given how little I've read of how Cupertino do their stuff;
• Mediocre advertising can now be produced automatically. Well that's the ad industry fucked then.

Hah. Just found this whilst searching around for something I said years back:

"I don’t see this as meaningfully impacting on the mass market (other than giving a slight kicking to other handset vendors)"

That'll be the iPhone, then. Oh, I could argue that a few percentage of market share isn't an impact on the mass-market... but impact ain't just how many of them you ship, it's how much they affect everyone else in the ecosystem, and iPhone - like many Apple products - has had impact disproportionate to its market-share.

• When is it inappropriate to use your iPhone - a romance flowchart;
• All hail the iPod touch; isn't it kinda amusing that one of the most popular mobile devices is completely disconnected from any traditional mobile network? Kinda says something about the telecomms industry I think;
• Is modern web design too like print design: "It feels like we’ve lost the “webness” of web design over an incredibly short period". Absolutely agree. We seem to have falled into a bit of a rut as far as our expectations of web design go...
• Very interesting report of the post-mortem for a large iPhone project;
• Node.js, an asynchronous framework for web applications. Can't decide if this is really cute (performance suggests so), or insanely evil (in that it seems to be retrofitting the WWW with select() calls)...
• If you're a fluent Japanese speaker, perhaps you could tell me what I'm talking about here? It's one of the interviews from my week in Japan...
• Simple and gorgeous - PhotoCard for the iPhone, an app to send email or physical postcards.
• I Blame The Designer: "Of course clients aren’t skilled designers; that’s why they had the foresight to hire us. But you know what? They know business. They’re as passionate, committed and talented as anyone. Many of them put their livelihoods on the line to make the web happen. And let’s be blunt: they also pay our salaries.". Bravo!

• The worlds largest multi-touch wall: "34 million pixels generated by 15 high definition projectors, supported by sound produced by 30 directional speakers"
• Twitter beard!: "just insert your face"
• Why your friends have more friends than you do: "You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends"
• Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk: "my 36-minute recording was transcribed while I slept, in less than three hours, for a grand total of $15.40"
• Opera Face Gestures: "lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures"
• Interesting post on design decisions behind Skype Chat, the best IM out there I reckon
• Differentiated presence on GMail chat status, nice touch: "when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages"
• How rich are you? Humbling.
• Square looks cute - the use of the headphone jack is particularly lovely, and I could see it getting uptake from smartphone owners (particularly if the customer hardware becomes fashionable or desirable), but I wonder how they plan to get the merchant side of the infrastructure rolled out to the extent that it's worthwhile.
• Via Dom, Appvent Calendar - a free iPhone game every day. Cute.
• The two use-cases of mobile - amen;

• Nokia exec talks Ovi platform, really nice discussion of where Ovi is and how Nokia see the world;
• Android Market games revenues rose in October, but only 53% which isn't the kind of massive growth you might expect to see this early in Androids life...
• Android compatibility library: "During the cross-compilation process, both the application and the Android compatibility library are cross-compiled from Java to Objective-C and linked with the Cocoa Touch compatibility library to yield a native iPhone application. "
• A new theory of awesomeness and miracles, including the putative construction of a go-playing machine larger than the universe;
• Fake Steve Jobs exposes a wonderful example of doublespeak: "I sent a copy of this to Katie with a note asking how we missed out on this guy, because he’s exactly the kind of coin-operated true believer we need around here."
• 5 things I wish someone had told me: "If your significant other absentmindedly mentions that he/she never sees you for dinner anymore, you had better resolve the situation quickly"
• Who can save Palm?: "Palm can only hope for a niche role in the smartphone market. Palm’s technology can only escape this role if WebOS software will become part of a strong, larger service ecosystem. One possibility is acquisition by RIM. Consumer potential of WebOS can take Blackberry user experience to a new level..."
• It's Googles world and handset makers just live in it: "by creating flagship devices featuring their latest and greatest they ensure forward momentum for the platform"
• Russell Davies at Playful (which I'm increasingly gutted to have missed): "These aren't games, like the industry thinks of games, these are something a little less, these are Barely Games. And these, are what I wanted to talk about."

I'm technically on holiday this week, but some links anyhow:

• Jeff Patton on kanban. Really interesting, (a) because it's Jeff and (b) for the content, and I loved Karl's talk on this stuff at the Skiff a few weeks back. I profess quiet caution though; having seen how many folks misapply the relatively disciplined approaches of more formal agile techniques, I fear the line "yeah, we're kanban because we stuck some cards to the wall"...
• Wonderfully put call for a group hug from Bill Buxton to the engineering and design communities. I particularly like the specifics he goes into here: how design awareness, literacy and even thinking can, with effort, be adopted by anyone... and how design practice requires professionals "who have invested just as much to acquire their set of skills as the computer scientists have put in for theirs". +1, +1, +1.
• SmutOnRails, Martin Fowler on the recent CouchDB presentation that caused a stir: "My observation is that most men in the software business think that there isn't much sexism left in the profession - that this curse is a memory from a previous generation. Yet when I talk to women, I hear a different story". Interesting, particularly in light of the Geek'n'rolla debate where this view of the software/digital/IT industry was confirmed (by both men and women IIRC). Lots of further reading at the foot of Martin's article.
• VCs are struggling to see the sort of returns they want in a mobile apps business. Whilst obviously on one level I find this a shockingly short-sighted yadda yadda yadda, another part of me breathes a sigh of relief. App stores are a fantastic economy, but no guarantee of riches, and we tend to hear about the few successes well over and above the mediocre mass.
• Steve Blank continues to deliver some amazingly insightful posts, and "Four steps to the epiphany" will, I suspect, be re-read a few times this year.
• For fans of contention and BlogWar, "Is Interaction Design a Dead-End Job" asks none other than Bill Moggridge. More optimistically, Tim @ Cooper suggests that "the acknowledgment and appreciation of good interaction design has allowed the practice to evolve to include a broader mandate encompassing product and service strategy throughout the customer relationship lifecycle".
• Vodafone hint that future Android devices might be less Googly and more Vodafoney. /me whistles innocently, stares into space, quietly lusts after HTC Magic.
• GMail for Mobile got the "mute" feature, which I'd never heard of but am frantically using. Oh yes - I may have forgotten to mention that I'm now using GMail in the browser for *all* my email needs... I've fallen hard for the 'plex in the last few months.
• Interesting iPhone stats from GreyStripe: average app gets 20 sessions usage of 10 minutes apiece. I wonder how this, combined with the typical development cost of an iPhone app, compares in cost-of-attention that other forms of advertising or promotion might garner. Help me, lazyweb...
• GraphJam is my new favourite best thing in the internet ever.
• T-Mobile sold 1 million G1s - not bad going for a first-generation device with every conceivable input mechanism and a spangly new OS that *isn't* being marketed by Apple. But let's not pretend that the success of Android is predicated on the sales of any 1, or even N devices, eh?
• Whilst we're on big numbers, 1 billion iPhone downloads, eh? I put this down more to Longino's Revised Statute than Buckley's Law in this case (tho Buckley definitely applies elsewhere): the sheer ease of trying stuff out on the iPhone is what's had me (and others I've had the pleasure of observing close-hand) installing apps. When all I lose by downloading a new piece of software is a little boredom, I'll do it again and again...

I had a first play with the Guardian APIs yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised by how simple and effective they were. I'm not one of those Ruby-on-Rails kids who mashes Google up with the Facebook in between grinding a fat half-pipe on an ollie; even I found them really great to work with.

And, being the kind of childish individual who still gets kicks out of looking rude words up in the dictionary, I decided to use the API to examine changes in obscenity in the last 10 years.

To do this, I took a group of common swear-words, and searched The Guardian archives for the number of articles containing each one for each of the last 10 years. This gave me an idea for the prevalence of the word, without being overly affected by, say, the vulgar rantings of Mr Brooker. I then divided this number by the total number of articles available for that year - giving the percentage of Guardian content containing each profanity, and accounting for the fact that the total volume of digital content, and by extension UK liberal coarseness, has grown year on year.

I present the results below. Good news! The y-axis runs from 0 to 0.9%; even a liberal rag like the Grauniad seems to be pretty resistant to the tidal wave of filth which some might have you believe is flooding the English language nowadays.

A few observations:

1. Swearing is growing slowly year-on-year, across the board;
2. Unusually, in 2001, swearing stayed more-or-less level. Bastard declined after 2001 - probably an after-effect of 9/11, after which most other swearing grew;
3. Wank is massively underperforming over the last decade, whilst cock is flat;
4. Shit has grown disproportionately and steadily since 2005, whilst fuck has gone as far as it can;

• Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development by Martin Fowler;
• Industry trends in prototyping by Dave Cronin;
• Kaizen and Kaikaku, an analysis of where agile adoptions go wrong. Happy to report we went Kaikaku;
• Flaccid Scrum, for the title alone;
• Fascinating set of user interface principles for Palm WebOS;
• More wisdom from Jeff Patton on product owners and product design;
• Web Programming Is Hard, via ATobe;
• Dougie passed on Programming Sucks;
• Continuous Deployment: now there's a good target;
• One Free Interaction, a wonderful essay from the Cooper Journal;
• Recreating the Button, a painstaking investigation of the redesign of web buttons for Google;
• Scrum is not about engineering practices;
• Continuing the life tracking theme, BedPosted - a site for you to track your sexual encounters with;

"It's a fucking web browser. It runs JavaScript a bit faster than other web browsers. That doesn't add up to a Windows killer.

...

People are calling Chrome a cloud operating system because it is a "platform for running web apps". It renders HTML and interprets Javascript, you know, like every fucking browser made since 1995. It's also got Google Gears built in. Great. I'll alert Tim Berners-Lee.
"

I'm *really* enjoying this guys writing.

Quadratura are doing an event in London in June. Go see their showreel, it looks amazing. Mr BigFug does lovely things with light :)

(and guitars)