Please Let It Be Real

Retina Display

While Apple’s super-crisp resolution has been an iPhone mainstay for a while now, the iPad still suffers from a slightly lower res screen. In spite of all its technological marvelousness it still stinks to see blurry pixels marring the screen. That’s why we’re desperately hoping that the iPad 3 will finally be the first Apple tablet to feature a true Retina Display. This improvement seems like a slam dunk, as word on the street is the new iPad 3 screen is 2048 x 1563, precisely double the resolution of the iPad 2. Even better, the screens have already gone into production. There are also cryptic references in the iBooks 2 files that seem to suggest Retina Display is on the way. In any case, this is the must-have feature of the iPad 3 and the primary component that will determine whether or not we upgrade.

LTE Compatibility

Even though the iPad has supported Wifi and 3G since its inception there have been some grumblings about its data transfer speeds. That may be a thing of the past though as the iPad 3 is rumored to be LTE compatible, making it the first iOS device to make the jump to the next generation of data. Strangely enough, the reason for the jump (beyond the obvious performance improvement) seems to stem from a redesigned battery which will allow the iPad to stand up to the power demands of LTE. It’s funny that one of the iPad’s most beloved features, its long-lasting battery, was one of the primary pieces of tech holding back LTE until now.

Dedicated USB Port

This one is a total longshot and something we don’t expect of the new device, but we still want it nonetheless. Adapters for the iPad 2 have allowed some USB devices to interface with the tablet, but the added dongles and compatibility questions mean we still aren’t even close to being able to hook up any USB device into our wonder-tablet. Instead Apple seems to be putting all its eggs in the Thunderbolt basket, and while we have no qualms with it that still means we’ll likely need a Thunderbolt to USB adapter. Why not just cut out the middleman?

What We Can Live Without

A Chunkier iPad

The primary downsides of the rumored enhanced display and upgraded chip (quad-core anyone?) is that it looks like the iPad 3 may be adding a bit of girth. Granted, the iPad isn’t exactly a hefty device and make it a touch thicker and heavier probably won’t be a big deal, but when televisions are debuting at CES which are measured in millimeters it’s a bummer to see any device get fatter. Also, considering the fact that one of the Kindle’s main selling points is that it’s light as a feather the iPad really can’t afford to pack on the pounds.

Gesture Controls

One of the more out-there rumors is that the iPad 3 will support gesture-based controls akin to what one might find on Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral. When your device really has a touchscreen do you really need gesture controls? As the original article points out, wouldn’t it be a better idea to bring Siri to the iPad instead? That’s something we could definitely get behind. These are just a few of the potential new features we’re really excited about and others that don’t get our juices flowing, but we’re always excited to potentially be surprised. Now that there’s some serious competition heating up in the tablet space we’re interested to see what Apple comes up with next in the name of continued marketplace dominance. Also, this being the first major product unveil since the death of Steve Jobs it should give us at least a bit of insight into what direction Apple will be taking for the foreseeable future. In any case it’s all eyes on Cupertino for the next few months.

Even though Google+ has been around for several months now the newest major social network is just starting to pick up steam. While G+ was originally viewed as a Facebook clone, it has begun to carve out its own niche in the social space. Still, some companies are wondering if it’s worth it to sign up for the service, and the answer is a resounding yes. Here are the top six reasons why.

6. You can create brand pages, and they’re easy to set up

While it took Facebook years to begin separating individual profiles from brands, G+ began offering the distinction almost right away. The process for creating a business page is simple and painless, and you can be up and running in literally less than a minute. No more mingling your personal social network life with your corporate, now it’s easy to organize. Speaking of organization…

5. Circles let you target your message to the right audience every time

Perhaps the most ingenious feature of G+ is the Circles, which allow you to group contacts using as many different criteria as you like. You can create a Circle for current clients/customers, another for prospective customers, employees, competitors, the list goes on and on. With your contacts grouped in such ways you can easily determine which Circles see which posts, allowing you to selectively share info. Never has communicating with disparate audiences with unique needs been so simple.

4. It’s good to spread the social media around

Chances are if you’re only using Facebook (or even Twitter), you’re inundating your followers with way too much information, most of which they never even see. A cluttered feed does you no good, so consider G+ a way to diversify content and reach a different audience. Perhaps you do most of your direct customer interaction through Facebook, but use Google+ as an outlet to post links and do more sharing.

3. It’s growing like a field of weeds

Even though Facebook may still be king of the social space, G+ is growing at an insane rate. In 2011 the service attracted over 45 million users, and it was the fastest social network to ever get to 25 million. And remember, all that is before they even launched that adorable Muppets commercial. Early 2012 buzz is also strong, so there’s no reason to believe the network won’t continue to grow in popularity.

2. Hangouts create unique opportunities for interaction

While the current setup of the group-video Hangouts feature is a bit limited, it still offers a great way to interact with the G+ community live and semi in-person. Staff meetings, webinars and surprise lunch with the CEO are just a few ways companies can leverage this feature in a unique manner, and really you’re only limited by your imagination. We do hope Google eventually ups the number of folks allowed in a Hangout, the current cap of ten just never feels like enough.

1. A strong G+ presence means better search results

The simple nuts and bolts reason your business needs to be using G+ is because it improves your search engine rank and SEO on Google, which is kind of a big deal. The new Search Plus Your World sets things up so that companies who are actively using Google+ and have a lot of followers tend to show up higher in search results then those  who are ignoring the network. There’s some question about the legality of this method and the US government has taken an interest in what Google is doing, but for now at least the bottom line for businesses is that you need to be on Google+ because it improves your SEO rank, and what executive has ever argued against that?

Can’t seem to crack the magic code that leads to sales in the iOS and Android App stores? Can’t figure out why everyone else seems to be making a mint off of apps but you’re swimming in debt? Here are the top five reasons you may be floundering, and if you’re already avoiding all these pitfalls then you may just be saddled with the world’s worst luck.

5. You aren’t marketing your app

There are a lot of folks out there who think that they have such a great app that all they need to do is share it with the world and the money will come rolling in. That is decidedly not the case, as the sheer volume of content released every day for smartphones and tablets overwhelms most users. Even though you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad, there are still ways to effectively showcase your hot new app and get it the attention it deserves. Partner with other companies to create mutual promotion, do a big sale or giveaway to prime the pump and get people talking about your app or take out a Facebook ad to try and try a few of the 800 million eyeballs from that site. Speaking of social media…

4. You aren’t effectively leveraging social media or you don’t understand how it works

The first thing you need to know about sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. is that they aren’t sales channels and they aren’t meant to be just another way for you to blast out advertising. The primary objective of social media is to build a community of devoted fans who will in turn become your grassroots sales team. If you’re actively engaging with your Facebook community then those folks will be the first to buy your products and tell your friends how great they are because they already have a relationship with your company. Using Twitter to act as first-response customer service and to engage with the wider community positions you as a reliable authority and a company that understands how to communicate with today’s market.

3. You aren’t getting reviewed

For iOS developers the best thing that can possibly happen to your app is to have it featured by Apple. While there is no magic formula for determining who will get the vaunted seal of approval, it’s pretty clear that apps which are reviewed often tend to draw a lot of Apple attention. There are numerous review sites out there but you definitely want to hit big ones such as TiPb, 148Apps and TouchArcade (games only). Even if the reviews aren’t necessarily glowing you’ll still benefit from the increased exposure and attention. User reviews on iTunes also provide a lift, so consider building an in-app reminder for users to rate your product and provide a review.

2. You didn’t pay attention to design

You may have created the world’s must useful app, but if it’s cumbersome, has a clunky interface or just plain looks bad you’ll be hard-pressed to get anyone to use it. We’ve developed the mantra of “design-led engineering” as a reminder that first and foremost users want something beautiful, elegant and easy to use. You want every aspect of every screen of your app to be pixel perfect, and refusing to fix something that doesn’t look right because it would be to time-consuming is a surefire road to failure. If you don’t have an eye for design then hire someone who does because there are far too many sob stories of awesome apps that never got off the ground because they were the ugly duckling in a room full of swans.

1. You made a bad app

There is a chance that the app you crafted, that you spent years of your life and thousands of dollars crafting, just isn’t very good. It’s a painful truth to admit, but when you consider just how many apps are released every single day you’re faced with the fact that honestly most of them just aren’t that great and consumers are typically smart enough that they can separate the wheat from the chaff. Before you even start development ask yourself two critical questions; “What problem does my app solve?” and “Are there any other apps out there already doing a perfect job?” Maybe you’ve come up with an awesome tip calculator, but there are so many apps like that already available there’s no reason for you to add yours to the pile unless it totally revolutionizes the concept. And let’s be honest, does it really? Also, can we all agree no more farting or burping apps? No one needs one of those let alone hundreds.

Apple’s big press event in Cupertino just wrapped up so we’re going to run down the big announcements. Yesterday we laid out some predictions for what we expected to see so now we’re going to go through and hit what we got perfectly right, what we got sort of right and what we missed altogether.

Nailed It

iPhone 4S Announced – Yesterday we guessed that Apple wouldn’t be bringing us the iPhone 5, but would rather introduce subtle updates to its current model. That turned out to be right on the money as the company unveiled the iPhone 4S, a phone that looks just the same as the iPhone 4 but sports a new A5 processor and dual core graphics chips. The built-in camera has also received a major overhaul and will now take pictures more quickly and clearly than ever before. It’s not the total redesign many of us were hoping for, but it still seems to be a rather competent device.

Sprint added as a carrier – Right at the very end of the event Apple snuck in the announcement that Sprint would become the third iPhone carrier in the US. Now we wait and see if this forces the other carriers to drop prices to match Sprint or if the spunky upstart ends up increasing prices to match the big boys.

Foul Tip

iCloud /iOS 5 Launched - The next generation of iOS, as well as the invention that will take us to the cloud will be coming on Oct 12. We’ve known these two were on the way for a while now, but we were hoping they’d make their grand entrance during or immediately after the Apple event. They’re still coming soon, we just have to wait another week.

Swing and a Miss

The iPhone 5 is also announced - Basically wishful thinking on our part, we just secretly were hoping for a substantial redesign.

The iPod Classic is phased out – Rather than killing a product Apple refreshed one, improving the functionality of the iPod Nano to make it attractive as both a pedometer and a watch in addition to being an mp3 player. Rebirth without death, kind of cool.

The no-contract iPhone – We were anticipating that Apple would launch a pre-paid version of the iPhone for those who can’t afford the expensive hardware and pricey contracts, but that never materialized. The silver lining is that Apple did announce that the iPhone 3GS will now be free with a 2 year service plan, but it was only $50 before so that’s not exactly an amazing deal.

Apple embraces NFC – It wasn’t even mentioned, so the technology is that much further from widespread acceptance.

Didn’t Even See It Coming

Siri knows all – We had heard rumblings that Apple would introduce something called Assistant today, but it hadn’t really registered. What we got was the introduction of Siri, a voice-recognition app that allows you to set appointments, reply to messages, check the weather and more without typing a word. It’s a very cool piece of tech that we can’t wait to get our hands on and play with on the new phones. Siri’s most impressive feature is that it learns your preferences as you use it, ultimately becoming a true virtual assistant. Of course it will eventually rise up and kill us all, but at least it can make our dinner reservations until then.

Cards - It’s an app that lets you create, print and mail greeting cards. Yep, that sure is a thing all right.

So did thew news today get you excited about the iPhone, or are you disappointed? Personally I was hoping for a bit more, but I’m still looking forward to trying out the new iPhone. Even a minor aesthetic redesign would have been nice though.

Tomorrow is going to be a big day, as Apple is finally taking the wraps off its latest iPhone model. There’s tons of speculation going around as to what will be announced at the event and what will be missing, so we figured it would be fun to weigh in ourselves. Here’s our breakdown of what will happen, what could happen and what should happen.

Will Happen

Apple unveils the iPhone 4S – Until earlier this morning I could have sworn Apple would be showcasing a brand-new iPhone, but recent rumors leave us in doubt. However, several highly placed sources are saying that the new phone will be an upgrade to the current iPhone 4, and there have been a couple leaks today suggesting we’ll only be seeing the 4S. First off, a German carrier has already begun advertising the 4S on its website, and a mention of the phone briefly appeared in a since-pulled iTunes beta. Thus it seems all signs point to a minor hardware refresh/upgrade rather than a full-fledged redesign.

iCloud makes its grand debut – This one is a foregone conclusion as Apple had already announced that iCloud would be coming in the fall. Furthermore, AppleInsider has reported that some users have been receiving iCloud invites already, though the link used to activate the account is currently dead. We expect the site to go live during or immediately after Apple’s press event tomorrow.

The iPod Classic is phased out – We also found out today that Apple has pulled all click-wheel games from the App Store, signaling that the company is moving away from the classic iPod and devoting full attention to the Touch and iPhone. If you haven’t upgraded yet it seems that it may finally be time to move on.

Could Happen

The iPhone 5 is announced after all – One of the things Apple is renowned for is corporate secrecy, leading every major announcement to be prefaced with conflicting and breathless claims from all sides. Just last week we were sure the iPhone 5 was coming based on the leaked cases that were making the rounds. Given the amount of time Apple’s had to work on a new phone we still believe it would be a misstep for the company to merely unveil an upgraded iPhone 4, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Ultimately we don’t know whether or not the iPhone 5 is showing up tomorrow, but like a kid on Christmas morning we’re still keeping an eye on the big present under the tree and hoping it’s for us.

Apple Announces a new carrier – While the vast majority of cell phone owners may have their contracts with AT&T and Verizon, there are still plenty of folks who would like to see more options when it comes to iPhone carriers. Enter Sprint, the third-largest carrier in the US and the last to still offer unlimited data plans. Many have speculated that tomorrow’s event will feature Sprint-related news, and the company itself isn’t exactly tamping down the fires by saying they aren’t getting the phone, so there may finally be a third pony in this race.

Should Happen

A no-contract iPhone is introduced – One of the biggest hurdles for those looking to adopt a smartphone is the long-term contracts and ridiculous price plans. While power users are able to justify the hefty plans, lighter talkers or those who would prefer to use their phone primarily for text and data have been reluctant to take the plunge. The smart move by Apple would be to reintroduce the iPhone 4 (and possibly even the 4S) as a low-cost, entry-level iPhone for those who want the features but not the contract. This would open up a whole new market to lower-income users or those who merely enjoy the freedom of not having a contract. Also, such a concept is no longer far-fetched since Walmart and T-Mobile have officially announced a similar deal which will offer Android smartphones with 100 minutes of talk and unlimited data and text for only $30 a month.

Apple embraces NFC – Near field communications (NFC) is slated to become the next great thing in mobile devices, but so far Apple has been reluctant to include such technology in the iPhone. NFC-enabled phones offer a wealth of opportunity to send data, pay for purchases and generally streamline our lives, but the technology is still unproven and Apple isn’t sure if the tech is all it’s cracked up to be. Ultimately we don’t really care one way or the other if the iPhone 4S/5 supports NFC, we just think it would be a cool feature.

So that’s our take, what do you expect to happen at the event? Leave your thoughts in the comments and check back in tomorrow when we rundown what actually happened and score ourselves based on how close or how far off we were. Either way, 10am on Oct 4 can’t come soon enough!

Yesterday Amazon made waves when it announced the Kindle Fire, a 7 inch tablet which the company is offering as their alternative to the iPad. The Android-powered device sports access to 18 million songs, magazines, apps games and more, as well as free Amazon cloud storage and a brand new predictive browser called Silk. All this also comes at a very attractive price point, as Amazon has priced the Fire at a mere $200.

The new device is indeed impressive, but is it a direct competitor to the iPad? For one thing the Fire is smaller, and it also doesn’t feature extra bells and whistles like a camera, microphone or 3G capability. Also, the Fire only packs 8GB of memory on-board, so users will be heavily reliant on the Cloud to keep tabs on all their stuff. Fire is definitely a nice piece of tech, but pound for pound it doesn’t stack up against Apple’s tablet heavyweight.

When you think about it though, that may not be such a big deal. While the iPad fancies itself a replacement for netbooks and a machine on par with low-level PCs and laptops, the Fire seems to have much less lofty goals. The smart move for Amazon would be to take the approach that Fire is a straightforward, friendly machine that will allow users to read books, listen to music, surf the Web and more at blazing fast speeds and in the most simplified manner possible. The iPad is the serious businessman of the tablet world, while the Fire is the fun-loving college student who can get some work done when he has to but ultimately just wants to hang out and have fun.

While it may be strange to recommend embracing a sort of “party boy” image, the truth of the matter is it would be Amazon’s best play. iPad commercials are more than a tad bit pretentious, and if Amazon can play off that and present Fire as the “tablet for the rest of us” then the company will likely carve out a sizable and lucrative niche. While I personally love my iPad it’s clear that it really isn’t the sort of device everyone needs, but until now there was no viable alternative. Other tablets sought to be iPad clones and failed, but the Fire is actually striking out and trying to differentiate itself.

The Fire seems to be the first true entrant in the realm of “lite tablets,” and thus stands in an interesting position. Will the scrappy upstart be able to pull customers away from the stalwart, established industry leader? We won’t know for sure until the Fire begins shipping this Fall, but at the very least it seems we have our first serious challenger yet.

There was quite a row last month when Netflix suddenly announced that they were splitting DVD by mail and instant streaming options and charging customers separately for each account. At the time it seemed like a greedy cash grab with the sole intention of screwing over the company’s most loyal customers. This morning the move has been clarified a bit as company CEO Reed Hastings has sent out an email to users explaining that Netflix as we know it is about to change forever.

In the email Hastings explains that the company’s two popular services will become entirely different entities from here on out. The streaming service will continue to be known as Netflix, while the DVD by mail option will be rebranded as the rather silly-sounding Qwickster. This new company will feature a new website, new packaging for DVDs and show up on bills as a separate charge for consumers. Reed also explained that due to the move the traditional Netflix Queue will no longer be integrated for both DVDs and instant watch options.

In a somewhat surprising move Hastings also stated that the new Qwickster service will begin offering video game rentals, putting it in direct competition with GameFly. Hastings didn’t elaborate on what sorts of deals are in place with publishers, so the size and availability of games is still a major question mark in regards to the new service. Pricing also hasn’t yet been specified, but at this point it seems users can only opt for games as an “upgrade” on an existing Qwickster account rather than as a separate plan.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Hastings’ email was the fact that most of it was written in a morose and regretful tone. He uses phrases like “It’s hard to write this,” and “I messed up” to convey that this isn’t a happy announcement about a new product, but rather a scorned CEO begging for a second chance. He also hinted that Netflix/Qwickster may be slowly pulling out of mailing DVDs entirely, writing “DVD by mail may not last forever, but we want it to last as long as possible.”

So it’s clear that this move signals Netflix shifting more than ever into instant streaming video, but is it a gamble that’s going to pay off in the long run? The service’s collection of available online content is impressive, but there are still gaping holes with popular shows and entire networks not being represented by the Netflix online service. Also, is it wise to jump into direct competition with GameFly over renting games by mail when the competition already has a stranglehold on the market? The Qwickster distribution system and Netflix name might lend them a bit more credence with publishers, but the industry is already fighting tooth and nail to curtail used game sales, so would they really welcome another alternative that may prevent consumers from buying their games brand new in a shrink-wrapped box?

Definitely some big news breaking this morning, we’ll keep you updated on any developments but in the meantime we want to know, do you think these changes are smart?

Every morning one of the first things I do is fire up Twitter and see what everyone’s talking about early in the morning. Today, judging by the condolence letters and links to “remembrances” regarding Steve Jobs I thought the poor man had died. My heart sank, I feared that his health problems had suddenly overtaken him and the world had lost a respected leader. At first I was hesitant to click on any links because I didn’t want it to be true. When I finally did muster up the courage to read an article stating that he had merely resigned as CEO I was relieved, but also angry. Why are we treating this like a national day of mourning? Sure, he’s a great man and it’s a big deal when a CEO leaves a company, but this wasn’t an unexpected move. Really, we all just need to calm down and realize this isn’t really a big deal.

First off, Jobs isn’t leaving the company entirely and will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board. While he will no longer be overseeing day-to-day operations of the magical building in Cupertino, he’s still going to be the one at the steering wheel. Jobs is doing what he should have done long ago and turning over the stress and frustration of running the company to someone else, and is instead moving to a position where he can still influence the company, but in a much more relaxed role. Besides, he’ll be the de-facto CEO for as long as he’s alive, nothing will come out of Apple HQ without the approval of Steve Jobs.

Also, let’s not forget that Jobs’ replacement, Tim Cook, has been groomed for this role for years. Cook served as Steve’s right hand man for many years, and even took over for Jobs once before when he took time off for medical leave. Did the company implode with Cook at the helm and Jobs out of the picture? Far from it, the whole operation kept humming along without missing a beat. Cook further reinforced his readiness by sending out an encouraging email to Apple staff assuring them that he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize Apple’s standing as one of the world’s most beloved technology companies. In short, he knows why the company is successful and isn’t going to make any drastic changes that may risk screwing it up.

Further reinforcing the notion that everything is going to be fine we return to the fact that Jobs will still be available to mentor and assist Cook whenever times are tough. Sure, he’ll try and be hands-off so Cook can be seen as a true leader, but it’s nice to know that when the going gets tough that he’s got a very powerful friend in his corner. Corporate transitions are always a bit of a concern and cause investors to react with irrational fear, but the truth of the matter is very little has changed. While it may be sad to no longer see that trademark black turtleneck up on stage at Apple keynotes or wait with baited breath for “One more thing,” things are going to go on just fine. Contrary to what I was led to believe this morning, Steve Jobs isn’t dead, and neither is Apple.

We’re here to give everyone a heads-up that Sourcebits’ own David Forgash appeared on this week’s edition of the Iterate podcast. You can stream the show directly from the Iterate site, download it and enjoy it later or subscribe via iTunes. This is a show that gets into the nitty-gritty of design on mobile platforms, so it’s chock full of amazing insights and inside information you can’t get anywhere else. Whether you’re a current designer, aspiring pro or just someone who finds this sort of thing fascinating, definitely check out the show.

Also, we’d love to hear your feedback on the episode as well as any follow-up questions you might have for David. Post them in the comments and we’ll pass them along!

This in-depth interview covered a lot of ground about the establishment and growth of Sourcebits, it’s business model and the future of mobile app development in India. The fact that a 5 year old company has a revenue of over 35 crores with a growth rate of 100% year over year has surely sent ripples across the mobile app development industry. Rohit also shared his vision on how Sourcebits is targeting the gaming space next with a target revenue of USD 50 million by 2013.

And if financial numbers don’t excite you, then you would still get motivated by knowing Rohit’s vision about Sourcebits and the future of mobile app development industry in India.

This surely can’t be missed! You can view the entire interview here

We want to thank the CBS crew for their great work on the piece, and we’re very excited that soon Sourcebits is going to have a very large presence right in the heart of downtown San Fran. We’re growing like crazy, and this new headquarters is just the first step in our major expansion plans. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned next.

Earlier today Apple announced that a staggering 15 billion apps have been downloaded over the past three years. That number is borderline unfathomable, especially considering that there aren’t even that many people on the planet. The current world population is hovering just under 7 billion, which means there are more than two apps available for every man, woman and child on the planet. Apple, by their own estimates, predict that there are 200 million iOS devices out in the wild, so that comes out to an average of 75 apps per device. Insanity!

Just for fun, I went around the house and counted up the number of apps I have installed on my devices and found out that I’m currently sporting 78 apps, so right around the average. I even consider myself a fairly light downloader, it’s hard to imagine how many apps the power users have! Just for fun, go count up your apps and see where you fall, you’ll likely be surprised by how many little squares you’ve got on your various screens.

The real question though, is does this massive figure portend a great future for apps, or does it show an over-saturation of the current marketplace? For instance, there are five pages of fart-related apps available right now, which means there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 programs designed to simulate the sound of flatulence. Doesn’t that seem to be a little bit much? Is the world really a better place with 300 fart apps?

The relative ease of development for creating a simple app, coupled with starry visions of making a quick fortune with the next big hit, has convinced many garage developers that not only do they have the greatest idea ever, but they need to share their genius with the world. Sometimes, this open nature of development pays off, giving us amazing projects we likely never would have heard about otherwise. Most times though, we just get another low-quality fart app. At least Apple has some level of quality control over what gets released, the free-for-all world of Android means that users can literally create anything, even malware and put it up for download. Sure, the barrier of entry into the App Store may be low, but at least it exists.

For serious developers this latest bit of information on downloads comes as exceptionally good news, pointing to a healthy marketplace that only seems to be growing every year. As more and more people jump into the world of tablets and smartphones the numbers of downloads will continue to grow exponentially, with predictions placing the market at $100 billion by 2015. Good luck finding anyone who’s not interested in being part of this modern-day gold rush.

The future of mobile and tablet development is indeed rosy, but we do need to be mindful of more stringent quality controls all along the way. Unscrupulous developers need to stop viewing the iPhone and iPad as get-rich-quick schemes and seriously ask themselves what they can contribute to the marketplace. If there’s anything we should learn from the gaming industry, it’s that even a prosperous industry can be completely undone if things are allowed to move too quickly. Let’s just hope that once we pass 30 billion apps downloaded that 20 billion aren’t devoted to farts.

1. Has code flowing in his veins and is in love with FOSS
2. Is a keyboard Ninja. Despises mouse. (They love the sound of their keyboards!)
3. Absolutely loves the terminal.
4. Loves LISP and functional programming.
5. Has distaste for authority
6. Believes that no problem should ever have to be solved twice.
7. Loves Math.
8. Worships Stallman and Bill Gosper.
9. Has emphasis on rationality.
10. Can never wear a suit.
11. Loves Daft Punk
12. Follows three virtues of a programmer – Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
13. Loves to customize everything around him.
14 Is 31337

Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Reddit. Digg. Del.i.cious… The list of social networking sites goes on and on and more pop up every day. We’re reaching a point of saturation and it would seem that soon there will come a reckoning. Indeed, Social networking’s own popularity may indeed be smothering itself.

At least that’s the thesis of a recent post on Technorati, one which states that abundance and specialization of social networks will fragment the audience and ultimately collapse the whole phenomenon. The post hypothesizes that we’re on a fast-track to returning to the early internet days of Usenets, where folks with similar opinions all gathered in echo chambers to talk about their chosen topics but didn’t interact with the rest of the web community at large. While it’s an interesting thought, I don’t buy it, and believe instead we’re heading towards an era when social networking will only get bigger and more inclusive than we ever imagined.

Facebook is the perfect example of the new trend as it started out as a glorified Usenet group (Harvard classmates connecting with one another) and then exploded into the behemoth it is today. At every step of its success Facebook grew not because it became more restricted and exclusive, but rather more open and general. First anyone at a university could connect to anyone else at a university, and then the networks expanded to high school students and ultimately everyone else. Suddenly you could become Facebook friends not just with classmates and professors, but high school chums, cousins who lived far away and even total strangers. Far from being a bunch of walled-off subgroups, Facebook and its contemporaries are all about plugging users into a larger community; they’re trying to turn the whole world into one giant collective. While some may balk at this notion, I personally find it to be incredibly exciting.

Granted, there is some subdivision within social networks such as LinkedIn’s groups or Facebook’s Fan Pages, but they’re only a small part of the experience. These sites don’t drive users toward groups, but rather offer them as an option to consider while spending time growing your network or finding new friends. They’re the quiet back rooms where you can get away from the noise and rowdiness of the population at large in order to conduct business or have a nice chat. The key difference between the new wave of social media and the old Usenet groups was that the old format sought to punish or expel those who didn’t conform, whereas new social media moves in exactly the opposite direction.

Some might be concerned that the sheer abundance of social networking sites is killing off their effectiveness, but this is an arena where the weak will basically cull themselves. Anyone hoping to launch a new social network has to offer something new and exciting, and consequently the networks we do join often compliment one another rather than directly competing. A lot of people who use Facebook are also on Twitter, and a number of LinkedIn users also frequent FourSquare; each service offers something different, and the areas where they overlap is nothing compared to the unique services they provide. Imitators are quickly discovered, shunned and forgotten about while the original and useful services continue merrily along.

In short, social networks aren’t fragmenting audiences, but are rather unifying them, providing us all a place where we can belong to something much bigger than ourselves. Even though it’s popular to hate on social networks these days, they remain one of the best contributions the internet has made to society, and they aren’t slowing down anytime soon.

We took a break last week to prep for our big investment news, but now we’re back with another edition of Our Favorite App Ever! (This Week). Today’s app is for all the shutterbugs out there who have a whole hard drive full of pictures they want to edit, touch up or otherwise tinker with on their Macs. We’ll go ahead and apologize to your dog now for all the glamor shots it’s going to have to endure.

Name: Aperture

Nominated by: Piotr Gajos, VP of Design

What It Does: Aperture is Apple’s attempt at offering top-quality photo editing software for Mac users. The app combines pro-level tools with a friendly user interface to allow just about anyone to take raw pictures and turn them into visual masterpieces.

Why It’s Our Favorite App Ever: Ask anyone who works in visual media what program is best for editing photos and they’ll almost always mention Photoshop. Of course, most only do so begrudgingly and through gritted teeth simply because Adobe’s program is cumbersome, resource-intensive and notoriously difficult to use for all but the most accomplished graphic designers. Though the program contains all the tools necessary to perform almost any task there is a rather large contingent out there who wishes there was some other way. Apple is trying to solve precisely that issue (for Mac users at least) with Aperture 3. The pro-level editing software aims to replicate all the functionality of Photoshop and other top-tier programs without being quite so overwhelming.

Aperture is truly aimed at those folks who have been using iPhoto to touch up their pics but need to go the extra mile and make the jump into something more professional. Consequently, Aperture borrows some of its best ideas from its iPhoto cousin, including the introduction of Faces and Places. Faces works to auto-detect and tag the mug of anyone who’s visage you import, while Places utilizes GPS metadata to map all where all your snaps come from. They’re both pretty neat bonus features that previous versions of Aperture have sorely missed.

Since most people who are going to use Aperture are either professionals or pretty devoted enthusiasts, its important for the app to perform on par or better with the other options out there, and it definitely does a great job in that regard. Dispensing with Photoshop’s idea of layers, Aperture instead offers brushes, which allow users to set the effects they’d like and then “brush” them onto an image simply by dragging the mouse cursor. Further helping matters is the fact that brushes can auto-detect edges, so if your overshoot your mark by a bit it’s not a problem, as the brushed-in effect will still stop where it’s supposed to. Combine this effect with all of the built in sliders and options and you’ve got an utterly complete picture editing app that can hang with the best of them.

While Aperture is easier to use than Photoshop it’s still meant for professional-level work and as such might be overwhelming to those with little to no photo editing experience. Yes, you can do a lot and the program tries to be as user-friendly as possible, but amateurs and weekend warriors may want to stick with iPhoto. We wouldn’t want you to spend $80 on an app just to get frustrated and give up on it. For power users though Aperture is as good as it gets and can stand tall knowing that it’s Our Favorite App Ever! (This Week).

[Ed. Note - Check it out, I got through this whole post without making a single Portal joke. Ok, just one... "I'm in spaaaaaaace!"]

Today, just a couple weeks removed from our 5th birthday celebration, Sourcebits is proud to announce that we have received a venture capital investment of $5 million each from Sequoia Capital and IDG. This marks Sourcebits’ first ever large-scale investment from outside firms, and we couldn’t be more excited! We’ve got big plans for the cash, including expanding our sales and development presence in the US, further strengthening our teams in India and growing our profile in Europe. We’re already a worldwide company, but now we have the resources we need to become a true global force in mobile, tablet and web development.

That’s not all though, as we’re also setting aside a portion of the funds to host a development contest where we scour the planet for top talent with amazing ideas and give them an opportunity to make their dreams come true. We’ll have more details on that soon, but if you’ve got an idea floating around in your head that you’ve always wanted to make but never had the resources then stay tuned, your big break may be coming very soon.

As we reflect over these past five years we can’t help but note how fortunate we are to be in this position today. Sourcebits literally started in a garage, when founder Rohit Singal decided to forgo a promising career in medicine to follow a dream to work in the emerging smartphone market. He started small, took some big risks, and ultimately formed a company that today stands ready to take its place amongst the giants of development. It’s been a lot of ambition, hard work and even a touch of good luck, but it’s also a success story for anyone with big dreams and the drive to see them through.

We also want to take a moment to thank all the friends, family, partners and clients who have helped us get to where we are today. Loved ones have put up with us through long nights and lost weekends, while our business partners took a chance on us and were rewarded with our absolute best efforts. Today, we continue with our strategy of helping others make amazing products while working on incredible projects of our own, and this substantial investment will put us in position to tackle even bigger and more ambitious concepts.

We couldn’t be happier with the past five years, and in light of today’s news we’re looking forward to seeing what the next five hold. For everyone who’s believed in us along the way, thanks for being there, we promise we’re not going to let you down.

At Sourcebits, we give utmost importance to innovation and creativity across various disciplines of designing and programming. While this article is all about scientific programming, we do have other talented engineers working on challenging problems in programming and computer science.

This article takes you into the world of scientific programming – from simple numerical computations to some complex mathematical models and simulations. Python has been used as a primary language for scientific computations as it combines remarkable power with clean, simple and easy-to-understand syntax. Various mathematical topics like Linear Algebra and Integration have been covered programmatically using Python. Differentiation and ODE’s have been covered using LISP.
The article gives you a basic understanding of scientific programming, which you can later use to explore deeper realms of this exciting world! The magazine is now available on news-stands and book stores across the country.

“Stay the course, light a star,
Change the world where’er you are.”

Enthralled by the same spirit, Sourcebits successfully completed five years of its operation on April 27th, 2011. A company which started in a garage in 2006 has now transformed into a multi million dollar company with hundreds of talented employees spread across the globe. This is nothing short of an achievement, and hence it called for a big anniversary bash!

To mark the occasion, celebrations were planned on April 29th. The Bitizens were all ready with their enthusiasm and energy to shout, sing and burn the dance floor!

The anniversary bash began with two sports events, namely cricket and table tennis. Obviously, it’s not possible to leave cricket behind in a country where it’s considered as a religion! The Sourcebits staff was divided into numerous cricket teams and a tournament was held between them. The adrenaline pumping game of cricket transformed grown ups into college kids! With so much shouting, running and catching going around, one could literally feel the energy and excitement in the air! We were surprised to see some really talented cricketers in our company. No wonder they enjoyed every bit of the game!
The table tennis games were equally exciting with people displaying their awesome racket skills in closely fought matches. Some bitizens also opted to cool off in the nearby pool!

This was followed by an awesome cultural event. It began with an energetic group dance performance by Bitizens on some of the most groovy Bollywood tracks. This really pumped up everyone and was thoroughly enjoyed by every Bitizen. This was proceeded by a hilarious skit performance, which got everyone rolling on the floor! And if this was not enough, we also had some melodious singing and an awesome flute performance. The cultural event ended with another awesome dance performance by Bitizens.

This was followed by brief talks by our VP(sales)-Sudip, VP(design) – Piotr, Web Director – Yaapa and Rohit himself! Piotr and Yaapa told us about our company’s past, present and future while Rohit threw light on our future plans and growth prospects. This was really inspirational and was heavily applauded by Bitizens. It is this enthusiasm in every Bitizen which has kept us going till now and will continue to drive our success in the future.

Finally, it was time for mouth-watering dinner! There was much to relish upon and everybody enjoyed the dinner to their hearts content.
Thereafter, Bitizens burned the dance floor on DJ’s tunes till midnight!

In all, everybody had a great time! We really thank Rohit was throwing such an awesome party and wish that we will continue to have such fun for years to come! Way to go, Sourcebits!!

Wow, what a week this has been! Sourcebits celebrated its fifth birthday in grand fashion (we can’t post the pics, but rest assured it was a wild and crazy time), and of course a couple folks who are kind of a big deal in England got married. Whatever, they seem nice, we sent them a juicer. But perhaps the biggest news of all is that it’s time for another installment of Our Favorite App Ever! (This Week), and our honoree is one you may already be familiar with. If not, check it out immediately!

Name: Reeder

Nominated by: Ben George

What Does It Do?: Reeder consolidates and compiles your RSS feeds into one, simple location so you can keep up on everything from Kate’s dress (pretty) to William’s favorite type of cake (carrot) while on the go.

Why Its Our Favorite App Ever: Numerous folks love spending their free time browsing their Google Reader to keep up on current events, but what do you do when you’re not at a computer and want to quickly and easily browse the news feeds of the websites you care about? Reeder solves the issue nicely by compiling your Google feeds into one app and presenting them for easy perusal and sorting. There are several ways to view stories in Reeder, and many bonus features are just a tap or swipe away. Swiping to the right marks a story as read and dismisses it, while swipes to the left star a story and save it as a favorite. Articles can also be quickly and easily sent to Safari, Delicious, Twitter and more, all from directly within the app.

Those interested in the iPad version of Reeder get a very different, yet also very elegant presentation. Instead of listing outlets and stories in a mail-like format, Reeder arranges articles in folders which can then be viewed with a simple tap. Those who want to look at only a section of a folder can pinch out and Reeder will show thumbnails of all the websites stored in a particular folder, allowing you to choose which outlets’ stories you want to view now and which you’ll save for later. While the whole thing may feel a bit labor-intensive at first it eventually starts to become second nature, and you may ultimately find yourself wondering how you ever kept things straight any other way.

Both iOS editions of Reeder are great, but the developers are taking things a step further and working on a Mac version of Reeder as well. Though a final edition isn’t quite ready yet, you can still download the beta and get a sneak peek at what’s coming. It’s very exciting to think about what sorts of awesome features might pop up in a desktop version of the app.

If there was ever a week when we needed help taming our RSS feeds this sure was it, but thankfully Reeder has come riding to the rescue. And that’s why we’re proud to call it Our Favorite App Ever! (This Week).

It’s time for our new Friday tradition, picking out an amazing app we can’t live without and sharing it with all you wonderful folks. This time around we’re showcasing one of the classiest, and most classic of games, chess. There are many apps out there devoted to one of the most time-honored and revered strategic board games ever, but this week’s nominee takes it to an entirely new level. So read on to learn all about the best way we’ve found so far to play chess.

Name: Deep Green

Nominated by: Dhaval Trivedi

What Does it Do?: It’s chess! Really doesn’t get much more straightforward than that.

Why It’s Our Favorite App Ever: If Deep Green sounds familiar to you that might be because it made its first appearance on the Apple Newton quite a few years ago. Now designer Joachim Bondo has brought his same attention to detail and stunning design to iOS and the finished product is downright breathtaking. Deep Green features pieces which appear as though they are cut from actual ebony and ivory, with the wood pieces sporting realistic-looking fibers and grain, while the ivory pieces sport genuine Schreger lines that prove the stone they’re cut from is the real thing. On top of all that, the playing surface itself appears scratched and worn, with dents made from years of (virtual) forceful play and tense matches. What you have is the most elegant and attractive chess set that you’ve ever not actually owned.

Bondo has a very specific vision for his projects, and summarizes his goals very succinctly. “Simplicity was, and still is, the overall design goal of Deep Green. Simplicity = beauty (how things look) + elegance (how things work).” The design is also applauded by John Gruber, who states, ““Deep Green exemplifies my fundamental rule for iPhone UI designers: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.” This isn’t a game that tries to be pretentious by creating a lot of specialized camera angles and animated pieces; but is rather a simple, straightforward chess app which is focused on great design and marrying form with function.

Looks alone make this app great, but there’s also plenty going on under the hood that impresses us as well. While experts will definitely enjoy the experience, the game is also newcomer friendly, including the ability to undo every single move made during a match all the way back to the very first turn. That way, when things have gone horribly awry and you find yourself beaten it’s easy to backtrack through the game and pinpoint the moment when your fortunes failed. This option is a godsend for beginners, as it allows them to instantly learn from their mistakes and deploy a better strategy the next time around. It’s the little touches like these which make this an app not just for hardcore players who can appreciate the nuances, but also for those looking to get into the game.

While Deep Green may be a bit more expensive than some other chess apps out there ($7.99), we truly feel like it’s worth every penny. Nothing else brings the same level of polish and sheer amount of options to this storied game. We absolutely love it, and hope it will be your Favorite App Ever! (This Week).

For most companies, managing to turn over a few million dollars of profit in a year is pretty good, and tens of millions would likely lead everyone to drop everything and have a giant party. Then again, Apple isn’t just any company, and their bar is a bit higher than most. Still, we imagine there are plenty of smiles in Cupertino today as the company has announced that it’s posted a profit of $5.99 billion… in the second quarter alone. That’s right, Apple just made in three months more money than most of our families will make in ten generations. Let that sink in for a moment, and when you’re done sobbing continue reading for more details.

What’s causing Apple’s massive success? Well according to the reports the company sold an estimated 3.76 million Macs,18.6 million iPhones, 9.02 million iPods and 4.69 million iPads (including the iPad 2). All of those numbers are up over the previous year’s sales except the iPod, and even those are moving faster than Apple had forecasted. Overall, this brings lifetime sales of iOS products to a total of 189 million, which is an impressive figure for any company but particularly so for one whose bread-and-butter is high-end electronics often sold at a premium.

Rubbing it in even further, Apple also revealed that iTunes also experienced its best quarter ever, though specific figures weren’t mentioned. The company did point out though that the App Store now showcases over 350,000 apps and developers have pocketed over $2 billion on Apple’s service. Of course, $1.7 billion has likely been made by the teams behind Angry Birds and Cut the Rope, but everyone else has made at least a few dollars here and there.

“With quarterly revenue growth of 83 percent and profit growth of 95 percent, we’re firing on all cylinders,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “We will continue to innovate on all fronts throughout the remainder of the year.”

Thing only look to get hotter for the company as consumers await the new iterations of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Though no release date for either device has yet been set, it will be interesting to see what sort of feeding frenzy breaks out now that the newest model iPhone will be launching simultaneously on AT&T and Verizon in America. There are plenty of folks, myself included, who have been waiting for the Verizon iPhone, and now that the company has a contract with Apple it’s just a matter of jumping on the iPhone 5 when it makes its grand debut.

Ultimately, it’s been a great quarter for Apple and we’re sure everyone working their is rolling in money. We just want to remind Steve Jobs and friends that our birthday is coming up, and we’ll forgive him for forgetting last year if he makes it up to us this time around. For $6 billion there’s this really nice island in the Pacific we’ve had our eye on for a while, seems like it might be a nice place…

What to consider in mobile enterprise strategy for business

We are witnessing drastic changes in operating environment of business .It has become increasingly important for the organizations to proliferate the information to the point of action( it’s team on ground ), also collect and use the data from the point of action in near real time . Organization are looking at ways to facilitate mobile worker productivity and improve customer service through mobile strategy.
Organizations that want to deploy there mobile strategy need to consider the below factors closely than ever before.

There is no straight forward answer on how to implement the enterprise mobile strategy , the reason being there are various angles in which today’s business operate. It is no longer vertical silo’s but closely knit honeycomb environment with various factor deciding the success of the strategy.

So it is not just a matter of consideration what functions will be provided through your mobile strategy to what user , but careful consideration of what business implication it will have . It is essential that organizations establish certain goals and process to ensure that mobile strategy succeed. The figure below outlines the broader steps that highlight the approach for enterprise mobility.

Key Considerations for Mobility in Enterprise

• Organization need to consider which business process to mobilize
• This is tricky part in strategy , because optimal mobile application should focus on a specific set of needs like enhanced customer interaction or increase access to mobile work force as opposed to deciding to mobilize the desktop version of their CRM
• Organization must decide on what the best development approach would be.
• Organization must find the right balance between breadth of the platform support and depth of application functionality
• Native or Web app debate is old one , considering that there is no clear cut solutions taking hybrid approach might ease some concern in deployment approach
• Organization doesn’t have control on the QoS
• Mobility require visibility for various component both in front and behind the corporate firewall
• Organization need to leverage the scalable tools for deploying standard application for the device management
• Organization need to consider the security needs , such as 3rd party compliance , securing content on the device , trusted access to corporate system , data protection
• Trouble shoot is another area where organization need to consider way forward when going for mobility solution

Do’s and Don’t

• Don’t Get Stuck in analysis paralysis
• Don’t bet/focus on just one platform
• Leverage flexible technology

NFC on mobile phone will not only enable with card payment solutions, but it will also enable other solutions like device as Tag reader or in Peer to Peer data transfer.

Android latest release 2.3 has some set of API exposed for card reading, which is capable of reading various tags like Text record, URL record, or smart poster tag. The support for P2P communication is not yet available through the API.

With this limited set of capability available, one could still build some interesting use cases. If you have NFC equipped phone like Nexus-S and get hold of Some tags. In below video, we have tried to make use of the available API to read the Tag info of smart poster and retrieve the information from background web server.

Click here to Watch Video

Interesting applications can be built around the current capability of Andriod device like:

1. Provide the personal advertisement tags in conferences, so that your client can directly go to your website with simple swipe.
2. Stick the tags in shops, so user carrying the phone can swipe on tag to get the details of the product may see some promotion video on the product.
3. Enabling the Guest carrying NFC tag reader app to hook into your wifi network if you have tag storing needed access parameter.
4. Change the device setting, like stick tag in meeting room door, so when user swipes there phone while entering the device goes to silent automatically.

True sharing applications can be easily be built once we have full support like Peer to Peer share, instant BT paring, touch triggered sharing, Vcard exchange, and many others.

Easy access of tags to general public coupled with full support by leading OS vendors will bring the NFC into mainstream in wider markets quickly.

More info on NFC can be obtained at

http://www.nfc-forum.org/home/

Increasing usage of Smartphone as primary device to access web and to stay connected has led to many developers and corporation to rethink their web strategy . Should a business require both a website and a mobile application? Coupled with fact that developer need to think on various deployment platforms like iPhone , Android , Symbian , W7 easily create the paradox of choice.

This report discusses differences between native and web app and some of the cross platform web based mobile mobile application development framework . These mobile application platfrom, are used to create native like applications which can utilize the majority of the native features of mobile devices, such as the GPS, camera, contacts, accelerometer, etc. report aims to make sense of choices available and how one can go about evaluating what suits the need

Definitions

Native Apps:

Native applications have binary executable files that are downloaded directly to the device and stored locally. The most popular way to download a native app is by visiting an application store such as Apple’s App Store, Android’s Marketplace, or BlackBerry’s App World, . Native app interfaces directly with the mobile operating system is free to access all of the APIs that are made available by the OS vendor . To create a native app, developers must write the source code (in human-readable form) and create additional resources such images, audio segments and various OS-specific declaration files. Using tools provided by the OS vendor, the source code is compiled in order to create an executable in binary form that can be packaged along with the rest of the resources and made ready for distribution.
These tools, as well as other utilities and files, are normally called the SDK of the mobile OS. Although the development process is often similar across different operating systems, the SDK is platform-specific and each mobile OS comes with its own unique tools. The following table presents the different tools, languages, formats and distribution channels associated with the leading mobile operating systems.

Mobile Web App

Modern mobile devices consist of powerful browsers that support many new HTML5 capabilities, CSS3 and advanced JavaScript. recent advancement of HTML5 and support of webgl turning into a powerful development standard for rich, browser based applications.
Access to rich media types, geo-location services and offline availability features and many more that are under development, developers are able to create advanced applications using nothing but web technologies can be installed just like other native application. There is other approach to web based development where some website enhance the user experience by creating a mobile website that looks like a native app and can be launched from a shortcut that is indistinguishable from that used to launch native apps.
There is a wide range of possibilities between these two extremes, with most websites implementing their own mix of features. Mobile web apps are a very promising trend. To capitalize on this trend and help developers build the client-side user interface, a growing number of JavaScript toolkits have been created, such as Sencha Touch and jQuery Mobile, which generate user interfaces that are comparable in look and feel to native

Hybrid App

The hybrid approach combines native development with web technology. Using this approach, developers write significant portions of their application in cross-platform web technologies, while maintaining direct access to native APIs when required. The native portion of the application uses the operating system API’s to create an embedded HTML rendering engine that serves as a bridge between the browser and the device API’s. This bridge allows the hybrid app to leverage all the features that modern devices have to offer.App developers can choose between coding their own bridge or taking advantage of ready-made solutions such as PhoneGap – an open source library that provides a uniform JavaScript interface to selected device capabilities that is consistent across operating systems The native portion of the app can be developed independently, but some solutions in the market provide this type of a native container as part of their product, thus empowering the developer with the means to create an advanced application that utilizes all the device features using nothing but web languages. In some cases, a solution will allow the developer to leverage any native knowledge he or she might have to customize the native container per the unique needs of the organization.The web portion of the app can be either a webpage that resides on a server or a set of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and media files, packaged into the application code and stored locally on the device. Both approaches carry both advantages and limitations. HTML code that is hosted on a server allows developers to introduce minor updates to the app without going through the process of submission and approval that some app stores require. Unfortunately, this approach eliminates any offline availability as the content is not accessible when the device is not connected to the network. On the other hand, packaging the web code into the application itself allows for better performance and accessibility, but does not allow for remote updates. The best of both worlds can be achieved by combining the two approaches. Such a system is architected to host the HTML resources on a web server for flexibility, yet cache them locally on the mobile device for performance.

Why consider web or Native app

The choice over a web or native (i.e. device specific) application holds important implications on, or is dictated by, a number of launch considerations for any mobile publisher or service provider:
User Experience design – native apps are traditionally superior in terms of performance and the only means to access device attributes such as geolocation API, camera, address book, and accelerometer.

Billing – web apps or mobile-optimized web sites typically offer greater billing options and allow for open distribution, independent of third-party vendors such as carriers or OEM app stores.( some OEM are tightening this door for web apps )

Reach – while mobile app stores attract more active users overall, web apps allow publishers and service providers to serve all smartphone audiences without the compatibility issues facing native app distribution.

ROI – the costs of development and updates are generally higher for native apps, but native app stores are said to generate higher returns thanks to the benefits of larger consumer bases and integrated billing, for example.

Go-to-market – web apps are often quicker to deploy particularly since they are not subjected to distributor approval , although in recent time app stores are fast to reach reducing the distribution time to weeks

Discoverability – with an influx of new applications into proprietary app stores it is increasingly hard to generalize whether visibility is higher over the web or native interfaces.
User analytics – web apps or web sites generally offer more direct, unfiltered access to user behavior data, which in turn enables product cross-selling opportunities and helps build customer loyalty.
Finally the constant evolution of web (e.g. HTML 5) and browser APIs, coupled with the increasing connectivity of native applications, continue to blur the lines between web and native applications in terms of end user experience.

Mobile Web App Platforms

over couple of year there has been growth of multiple mobile web based application platform specifically targeting the support for popular mobile devices , these platform specifically address the developers need for cross platform support prompting idea of “Develop once Deploy multiple” below table list the feature set for some of these platform which will be analyzed in in detail in later sections

PhoneGap
PhoneGap is tool for building the mobile apps using the web technology , it make use of:
HTML for layout
JS for accessing device functionality
CSS for rich look and feel
based on W3C standard , PhoneGap offer consistent cross-device API , the app developed using this can be just web pages that have access to the device functionality , apps use CSS for providing UX , PhoneGap enhance UX by making of hardware acceleration in platform like iPhone , support for JS like jQuery, XUI is provided for creating native looking UI

Feature support details :
There is usually a server component involved for apps developed , JS calls the server via XHR to get the JSON data , HTM/JS/CSS+ graphic assets are usually residing in the device packaged as part of build process , JS can store retrieved data in SQlLite Db for offline access , some optimization is possible as JS is allowed to cache images and other stuff
PhoneGap support the device functions like GeoLocation , Compass, Accelerometer , Telephony,Camera, Media Playback+Recording, Contacts ,Video with HTML5 video tag, FileIO, vibration , SMS, MAP,Orientation change support

Titanium

Titanium applications are divided into 4 main parts:
1.The html/css/javascript code that makes up the core application logic and UI
2.The APIs that access native device/desktop functionality, analytics or other modular functionality
3.The language-OS bridge that compiles web code into native application code
4.The run-time shell that packages the application for cross-platform distribution.
Once built, Titanium-based applications can be tested, packaged, and distributed through the Appcelerator Network’s cloud services. The Titanium platform is open source, so you may also access the source code to the complete application at any time for your own us

Feature support details :
Currently support is limited to Android and iPhone platform , using this platform developer have access to the device features like Geo Location , Vibration ,sound play and record , camera , File IO, multitouch , SMS, Telephony , camera , video play back Contact support to name few .

Rhodes
Rhodes is tool for building the mobile apps using the web technology , it make use of:
HTML for layout
JS for accessing device functionality
CSS for rich look and feel
it also support Ruby which is compiled into Ruby 1.9 bytecode , and provides VM for apps to run on the native platform , this platform consists of two essential component of RhoSync which is sync frame work for access the Ruby based backend. other component being RhoHub which makes building Rhodes applications easier, reducing the overhead of getting started and as well as streamlining ongoing development effort by taking care building the app for multiple platform for user .

Feature support details :
Rhodes support device features like Geo Location , Vibration ,sound play and record , camera , File IO, multitouch , SMS, Telephony , camera , video play back Contact support to name few .

Comparing the Different Approach

.So to summarize, let’s take a look at all three development approaches compared to each other
Native excels in performance and device access, but suffers in cost and updates. Web is much simpler, less expensive and easier to update, but is currently limited in functionality and cannot achieve the exceptional level of user experience that can be obtained using native API calls. The hybrid approach provides a middle ground which, in many situations, is the best of both worlds, especially if the developer is targeting multiple operating systems.

As can be inferred from the table above, no single approach delivers all of the benefits all of the time. Choosing the right approach depends on the specific needs of the organization
and can be driven by many parameters such as budget, timeframe, internal resources, target market, required application functionality, IT infrastructure and many others. But one thing is clear; most companies today face an obvious tradeoff between user experience and application functionality

Summary

As mobile applications continue to take a center role in the business landscape, organizations around the world are mobilizing a growing number of mission-critical services. Many companies are striving to find the optimal development approach to achieve their goals, but what many are quickly realizing is that each carries inherent limitations and no single approach can address all the growing needs and complexity of the modern mobile enterprise. As this paper points out various approach in application development , the selection of method should be based on one that can harness the benefits that each provides and support not only the development of optimal mobile app for your needs, regardless of their development approach.

Companies forming their mobile strategy must also consider the future of this market;

Further fragmentation of mobile devices and technologies, which in turn, will continue to increase the overall costs and complexities that are associated with mobile application development, integration and ongoing management;

Accelerated mobile adoption by consumers and within the enterprise increasing the requirements around security, scalability and ongoing control;

New device features and complementing technologies such as near-field communication, Geolocation, augmented reality, social networks, and others which will undoubtedly give rise to new types and new use cases of mobile apps;

And new distribution channels for the apps, both public and private, allowing organizations to easily place the apps in the hands of the user, quickly deploy updates and manage its entire portfolio of apps without going through a long submission and approval process.

Taking all these parameters into consideration, companies must choose a solution that is not only flexible enough to support all types of apps but would also support the secure and scalable integration of the apps into the IT infrastructure

We’re back with another edition of Our Favorite App Ever! (This Week) and this time around we’re looking at the world of productivity. There are so many Getting Things Done (GTD) apps out there that you almost need a special organizer devoted exclusively to keeping track of all your GTD apps. While this week’s nominee doesn’t exactly fill that niche, it may help you sort out your schedule well enough that you actually get a moment’s peace to let yourself breathe. Of course, no sooner will you get that second that another project is thrown in your lap to make things just as hectic as ever, but that’s just how life goes right?

Name: The Hit List

Nominated By: Piotr Gajos, VP of Design

What Does It Do?: The Hit List is an organizational app which lets you manage all your appointments, projects and commitments right from your desktop. The program seeks to make life simpler through the joy of lists, allowing you to “plan, forget, then act when the time is right.”

Why It’s Our Favorite App Ever: While there are a lot of apps which aim to help you organize your life few do it in as elegant a way as The Hit List. A simple press of the Enter key allows you to pop up a field in which you can create and assign a new task. Once you’ve entered all the details you can easily shift the task into a folder, letting you keep your projects organized as efficiently as possible. Creating folders for home projects, work assignments, personal commitments and more allows you to easily keep everything straight in your mind and help prevent feeling overwhelmed. Also, anytime you have a file you need to attach to one of your tasks you merely need to drag and drop it into the appropriate spot, so simple! One of the biggest hurdles for many when it comes to a new GTD app is getting adjusted to the UI. The Hit List all but skirts this issue entirely by offering an attractive, simple means of navigating and organizing. Thus, you spend less time organizing projects and more time actually working on and finishing them.

On top of the slick interface the app also provides plenty of nice bells and whistles which are sure to please. Tabs along the top of the screen allow you to divide up work in various ways so you can keep track of tasks due today or in the near future, plan long term and even check your mailbox for important info all without switching programs. Another fun extra is a timer which you can use to keep an eye on how long you’ve been working on any given project. It’s an invaluable asset when you’ve only got a set amount of time to devote to one job or when you work on a project basis and need to charge by the hour. Furthermore, you can also sync The Hit List with you iCal, keeping all aspects of your work up to date at all times.

All these features, plus other nice inclusions like ample keyboard shortcuts and the ability to create sub-folders means The Hit List might be the last organizational GTD app you ever need. We’ve also heard rumblings that the program will be coming to other platforms soon but have thus far been sworn to secrecy on the details. Currently, you can enroll in the app’s beta for free, but be warned in advance that the full version will cost $50 when released. Of course by then you’re likely to be so in love with The Hit List that you’ll pay any price to check out all the latest and greatest features.

Enjoy your newfound productivity and Our Favorite App Ever! (This Week).

Welcome to the first entry in our brand new series, Sourcebits’ Favorite App Ever! (This Week). Every Friday we’ll bring you an app nominated by someone on our staff which we think you just can’t live without. Sometimes the featured product will be a game, sometimes it will be a productivity app, sometimes it’ll be a brand new service. The only way to find out what’s coming next is to check in every week and see what we have in store. So without further ado, let’s see the very first Favorite App Ever!

Name: Fast Customer

Nominated by: Brad Hilderbrand, PR/Marketing Manager

What Does It Do?: Fast Customer eliminates wait times when you’re put on hold by taking care of all the automated options and wait times and only asks you to pick up your phone when there’s a human on the other end waiting to talk to you.

Why It’s Our Favorite App Ever: We’ve all loathed waiting on hold ever since the phone companies first discovered the technology to route multiple calls to one number. These days it’s hard to call any company of any decent size without having to listen to terrible music or corny ads for excruciatingly long periods of time. Even worse, you’ll constantly be reminded by a mechanical voice that “your call is very important to us” as you fume angrily at all the time wasted sitting around waiting to talk to someone who can tell you why the stupid light on your stupid router won’t stop blinking and just let you use the Internet. Being on hold is very much akin to being in the First Circle of Hell, as it’s infuriating and terrible but you continue to hold out foolish hope that someday everything is going to be work out for the best.

Fast Customer eliminates this hassle entirely by dialing customer support of whatever company you want and running through the automated options until it reaches the point at which you’re waiting in line to talk to a real person. When the customer service rep does finally pick up Fast Customer directs them to push 1, and at that point your phone rings and you’re instantly connected to another flesh and blood person. Total wait time for you, 0 minutes and 0 seconds.

What makes Fast Customer even more impressive is the huge database of companies it stores and its intricate knowledge of how each phone tree is set up. It’s not a fancy algorithm that makes the app run, but rather hundreds of hours of research put in by the app’s creator, Aaron Dragushan. Dragushan called the support numbers of over 1,000 different companies and tirelessly worked through each automated system to learn the fastest route to a real human being. He then logged his data and programmed it directly into the app, saving users the trouble. The only danger is that if companies change their phone options it might mess up Fast Customer, but a quick, free version update should smooth out any issues that crop up.

Fast Customer is a particularly great app for anyone who needs to make a phone call but doesn’t have time to wait around forever. If you’ve got important work to do the last thing you want to deal with is having a phone pressed to your ear all afternoon, so with Fast Customer you can simply select which company you need to get ahold of and let the app take care of the rest. It really can’t get much easier.

So congratulations to Fast Customer for being our inaugural Greatest App Ever! (This Week)

The interwebs is currently buzzing with WebGL! Hence, we also decided to get our feet wet with it. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you must have heard a few things about WebGL. However, I would still like to begin with a brief introduction about WebGL.

As Wikipedia says, “WebGL is a royalty free, cross platform API that brings Open GL ES 2.0 to the web as a 3D drawing context within HTML.” Simple speaking, WebGL is an in-built library within modern browsers for developing 3D(and also 2D) applications, which can run on any modern operating system having a good graphics card and a fast processor. So, make sure that you have an up-to-date system if you want to enjoy all the WebGL awesomeness!

You can view the moon system here

Even though we had a lot of fun with the announcement of The Hipster’s Companion, it’s time for us to come clean. Though we think the app would be pretty amazing, it’s just an April Fool’s joke. Our apologies to anyone out there who had their hopes up, we promise next time you’re in town we’ll take you shopping for some skinny jeans. The Sourcebits crew is a hardworking bunch so we wanted to take a day and just be silly and join in on the April Fools fun.

Also, we want to point out that while The Hipster’s Companion doesn’t technically exist that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t. We’ve got a very talented crew of designers and developers who can turn just about any idea into a reality, and if we set them loose on this concept they’d probably come up with something a million times better than what we teased here. So hey, if this app is actually intriguing to you then get in touch and let us know. We always love hearing from you, even if you just want to tell us what jerks we are for tricking you this morning.

Have a great day everyone and make sure to keep your pranks harmless. Remember, it’s only funny until somebody gets hurt… then it’s hilarious.

You’ve suffered under the thumb of non-enlightened sheeple long enough, it’s time to finally strike out on your own and declare yourself a true independent. To that end Sourcebits offers The Hipster’s Companion, the only app you’ll ever need in your new lifestyle. Just check out the amazing features we have to offer.

• Find the hottest fashions – Simply pull up the fashions tab on The Hipster’s Companion and it will immediately locate every Urban Outfitters store within a 20 mile radius. The app is also optimized to track sales on skinny jeans and leggings, as well as non-prescription, heavy-framed glasses with or without lenses.

• Optimize your dining experience – Tired of those corporate chain casual dining spots  that dominate the landscape? Now you’ll be able to hunt down only places that serve vegan meals and offer locally brewed beers. Sure, you may have to drive four hours just to find a place to eat, but would you really rather go to Applebee’s?

• Get recommendations for the best music – Now that Arcade Fire has won a Grammy their totally over, but The Hipster’s Companion will help you find the next amazing band no one’s heard of and who you can completely abandon once they start to get big. Just simply select from the list of seemingly incompatible musical styles to find the latest techno, hip-hop rockabilly act, or randomize your choices for the true hipster experience. You can buy any songs available on iTunes directly from the app, but shouldn’t because any band that’s on iTunes has already sold out.

The wait’s almost over. The time is nearly here. Tomorrow, Sourcebits unveils its most incredible project yet. Mark our words, this is going to be THE featured app of the season, and you can fully expect to see it in the Apple Staff picks, New and Notable section of iTunes and all around the web. Don’t be left behind, get your smartphones and tablets ready, this is going to blow your mind.

We’re just a few days away from announcing something amazing, life-changing and utterly cool. We can’t give you all the details yet, just know that we’re going to forever change the way you look at apps. Stay tuned to this space for details…

Big news out of Cupertino today as Apple has officially announced that the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will take place June 6-10 at Muscone West in downtown San Francisco. The event is a chance for developers from across the globe to gather in one locale and learn at the feet of the masters, as Apple designers and employees will be on-hand to guide attendees through a number of informative, technical lectures and labs in the hopes of assisting development across all iOS devices. WWDC is often regarded as one of the most important events of the year for developers working on Apple products, and the attendees often represent a veritable who’s who of iOS development.

In addition to the various workshops and labs, the WWDC keynote is also the time when Apple makes their big summer announcements, and has historically been the outlet where the company shows off the latest edition of the iPhone. That may be changing this year though, as some outlets are reporting that this year’s show will be a software-only event, with no new hardware announced. If that is indeed the case, then the iPhone won’t see it’s traditional June launch, and may instead not appear until sometime this fall. There are also rumblings that Apple may be planning to show a brand new iPad later this year as well, so some folks are beginning to speculate that the iOS line may be moving from a staggered refresh throughout the year to a mass rejuvenation just in time for the holidays. Then again, we may very well be seeing the new iPhone at WWDC after all, and Apple just isn’t telling us yet. This is a company that is well-known for its secrecy and ability to keep most everyone off-guard. What we do know is that the show will feature on upcoming updates to iOS and Mac OS operation systems, so perhaps we’ll get to see final or near-final builds of iOS 5 and Mac OS Lion.

Another major point of interest regarding WWDC is the fact that it is competing directly with the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the game industry’s biggest annual event. While WWDC is taking place in San Francisco, E3 is a ways down the coast in LA, so media outlets and bloggers who cover both mobile and gaming will have to choose which event to attend this year. While there are two distinct audiences for these events there is some overlap, and the scheduling of WWDC may be Apple’s subtle way of challenging the game industry. Perhaps, after Satoru Iwata took some shots at Apple at GDC earlier this year it’s time for a bit of payback. It would be quite entertaining if we learn that Apple’s WWDC keynote is scheduled for the exact same time as Nintendo’s E3 press briefing.

Pretend rivalries aside, registration is now open for WWDC. Get your tickets and book your hotel now before things fill up.

At Sourcebits, we always believe in pushing the envelope with our cutting-edge solutions. Sourcebits Labs is our initiative to come up with mind-blowing solutions utilizing the latest technologies and ingenious programming techniques.

Labs gives you access to some of the most creative and innovative products developed by engineers and researchers at Sourcebits. This is your opportunity to not only have fun with some of our latest products and technologies, but also learn a lot about nifty programming techniques from our developers.

About the Tool:

This is a simple 3D model loader. The loader supports Collada Format version 1.4.1.

Current Features:

1. Loading of 3D Models in Collada format.
2. Materials support with a global light. The technical specifications about materials support can be found in the next section.
3. Global light that can be switched On/Off. Lights are not being currently loaded from model file rather a global light which illuminates the entire scene. Meant to showcase OpenGL’s lighting capabilities.
4. Camera transition support is present. The camera can be moved along the 3 axis.

Loader supports tracking of a single object. If calling methods for object tracking make sure the model is a single mesh model and it’s name contains “root”(in lower case)Technical Specifications: Any model object in Collada format can be viewed with this loader as long as it adheres to the following tech specs:

Triangulation:

The model should be triangulated. A triangulated face means that it should have only 3 vertices. Polygon drawing in not supported in OpenGL ES.

Any models which are not triangulated can be easily converted using Blender.

Download Blender: http://www.blender.org/download/get-256-beta/

Root:

The camera tracking is not useful in most of the cases, so this model loader supports tracking of an object, which means camera can track all the movements of a specified object. The camera can be moved along X & Y axis and rotated along the Z-Axis (only) when tracking an object. To specify an object to be tracked, ensure that the name of the object contains the “root” keyword. The loader will search for any such object and will start tracking. However, if for some reason only camera needs to be moved then the camera specific calls can be used.

Camera:

As already mentioned in almost all Open Gl sites and forums that we do not have the privilege of camera object in Open GL ES ,so we need to simulate our own camera in Open GL environment. This has been achieved by using the GLULookat() method provided in OpenGL API. The default positioning of the virtual camera is based on the Camera Node present in the 3D model. So try to make sure that only one camera is specified in the model. The object , you are interested to be focused when the scene loads should contain the “root” keyword in its name.

Z-Up:

The camera in this loader reads the Up Axis tag in the collada file and most of the model files has their Up-Axis as Z-Axis, which runs from bottom to top of the screen. This is more of a spec, dependent on the 3D modeling tool, you have used.

Blender.

This is a free tool which can be downloaded from the above link. The models that you make in this is not triangulated by default. Make sure you do it yourself.

The core points to make any model work are given below:

1. Specify a camera.
2. Specify a mesh with name that contains “root”. (Ex:- root-mesh etc.).
3. Make sure your object is triangulated.
4. To track an object make sure the object to be tracked is a single mesh object as multi mesh objects cannot be moved and tracked by camera.
5. The loader supports only meshes with single mesh per geometry.

Few errors that you might encounter when using this library:

1. If no camera is present and you try load a model the application crashes.
2. If no root model in present then it crashes when you try to track the object.
3. If the model file is very big then it might end up with its Heap memory so try keeping the models simple and try to play with simple geometries. However, scene with multiple geometries are very well supported.

**The application is currently still under development, however, the future releases would incorporate more features and would be much more stable.

**This model is a free library that can be used for commercial/non-commercial purpose.

Please refer to the attached sample application’s source code – Download

Steps to test sample app:

1. Install the test application
2. Put your model (.dae) file on the sdcard.(Sample models are available inside the archive. Store them on your sdcard.)
3. Launch test application.
4. Specify the model name.
5. Click on load.

It might take time loading the file depending upon its complexity and size.

Do provide us your feedback in the comments section below

Our apps were in the top 50 list when the iPhone app store was launched, we made it to the top 50 list with the advent of iPad app store and now we have done it again with the Mac app store!

Our consistent performance at the app store only indicates that the force is strong with Sourcebits!

Posterous for Android has been developed by the engineering team at Sourcebits and we’re proud to announce that the application has been featured at 3rd place in the Android Market. That’s quite a success in a short span of time!

The Application gained momentum right from the day it was published on the Android Market and it has seen an exponential increase in its popularity ever since. Adding blog posts is extremely simple with the Posterous application. Simply click the post button and type away, or click the plus icon at the top of the screen to add media content such as images and video.

Posterous is currently available for free on the Android market, and should support all Android versions.

SPOT Connect™ turns leading smartphones into a personal one-way satellite communicator capable of sending messages with GPS position to personal contacts, social networks or to summon help in emergencies from remote areas beyond cellular coverage.
Spot Connect™ was also featured on Gizmodo and Engadget.

We’re proud to be associated with Spot LLC as the Spot Connect application developer for iPhone and Android devices. Spot LLC came up with an ingenious solution in satellite communications and our engineers have implemented it in a smart way on leading devices like iPhone and Android. The Spot Connect application syncs information with the Spot Connect device via bluetooth, which is then transmitted to the GPS Satellite system.

The SPOT Connect app can be downloaded anytime and works when SPOT Connect is registered with SPOT Basic Service and paired with the smart device.

We are very proud of this achievement as we continue to aim higher with our talented team of designers and developers. Sourcebits was established in 2006 and since then we have grown exponentially in every aspect of business – from revenues till product innovation.
In fact, our journey has been nothing short of amazing. In a short span of four years,we have transformed into one of the most creative and forward-looking software development companies in the world with over 250 expert programmers and critically acclaimed user interface designers across the globe.

“We strive hard to put only the best – both in design and function, out there.”, says Rohit Singal, CEO and founder, Sourcebits. In fact, our rapid growth can be attributed to our philosophy of believing in nothing but the best. The Sourcebits team is equally excited about this news and is all geared up to take on the numero uno position on the list.

To read more about Technology 500 list, click here.

A website theme essentially consists of four elements:

1. Layout

2. Color

3. Typography

4. Images or Illustrations

Whether you’re buying a theme or designing your own, always take a note of the above four elements. Let us take a look at each of them in detail.

Layout

We can roughly define a layout as a systematic arrangement of all the content on your website. However, it has to do a lot more than just arrangement of content. Infact, there are psychological studies for layouts of websites, newspapers and magazines. Let us take a few examples to undestand how different layouts are needed for different kinds of websites.

Companies specializing in web-based applications aim to display their product information in a simple and yet effective manner. Hence, their layout should consist of a large section devoted to the product followed by all other information. This design pattern can be seen on many web application websites with a large section above the fold devoted to the product, followed by all other information in a 2 or a 3 column layout.

Mint.com

Mailchimp.com

On the other hand, most newspaper websites have a multi column layout owing to a large amount of content.

Financial Times

New York Times

Useful links and resources to know more about web layouts:

8 layout solutions to improve your design

Fixed vd Fluid vs Elastic Layout

40 creative design layouts

Color

Color affects visual hierarchy and legibility of type, so it’s important to choose the right colors, and not just the expected ones. Let us take some examples to understand how to choose the right color scheme for your website.

Tapbots

As you can see in the above screenshot, only two background colors (and gradients) have been used in the entire website. The use of simple background colors not only makes the website elegant but also makes the illustrations look better. Note that colors can be used to distinguish different kinds of information. Thus, the header, footer and main content can be easily distinguished with the use of different colors. This is also known as color coding. To be effective, color coding must be relatively simple and should be easily identifiable. Using numerous colors can create confusion in the mind of the visitor. Hence, it is advisable to use only up to 3 different background colors as far as corporate/professional websites are considered. A similar design strategy can also been seen on Blackberry and Apple websites.

Blackberry

Apple

However, it’s an altogether different case for kids websites. Here, you can use a variety of colors judicially as its necessary to have something colorful and attractive for the intended audience.

Toon Toon

You can also make use of tools like Adobe Kuler to choose a color scheme for your website. If you’re buying a theme, then make sure that it is available in various colors.

Useful resources to know more about using colors in web design:

Color theory for designers- Part I

Color theory for designers- Part II

Color theory for designers- Part III

Color meanings

Typography

Good typography is just as important on a Web page as it is in any other medium. While choosing a typeface, you should take a look at the images that accompany the text or think about the objects related to the subject matter. In this way, you can have a typeface which blends perfectly with images or illustrations. Also, choose typefaces for specific purposes. But remember that too many typefaces can be distracting and therefore do not use more than three typeface families on your website.

Useful links and resources to know more about web layouts:

10 web typography rules every designer should know

The elements of typography styles applied to the web

8 simple ways to improve typography in your designs

50 useful design tools for beautiful web typography

40 excellent free fonts for professional design

Images or Illustrations

Images and illustrations play a vital role on your website. They are more readily processed by our brains as compared to text and hence they make instantaneous connections with the visitors. While a few good images and illustrations can attract the attention of visitors, a few bad and low quality images can drive them away from your website. Moreover, you should try to get creative with your photographs. Nothing is more boring than a commonly used instance of stock photography. Rather than using images of people in business suits, try to find some images which relate to the subject matter. The choice of illustrations over photography opens up tremendous possibilities of passing information. You have more creative freedom while working with illustrations. For example, Gowalla has made some excellent use of illustrations to promote their business.

Gowalla

Following resources will help you know more about using images and illustrations on your website:

Using photos on your website

Tips on using images on your website

40 excellent examples of using character illustrations in web design

40 excellent illustrations in web design

I hope you would find this article helpful in designing your own website theme. Do tell us about your thoughts on this article in the comments section.

1. Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming. You’ll not only find answers on Stack Overflow but also some useful tips and tricks by the best developers on the planet. This is a must-have website for your bookmark bar!

2. Snipplr

Here I am working to tight deadline – as usual – hunting for a few lines of code from this project I finished in… oh… when was it… oh damn, what was the name of that project, which client… ugh… good grief >_<;;  Snipplr was created for precisely these situations. With Snipplr you can keep all of your frequently used code snippets in one place, accessible from any computer.

You can find code snippets for nearly all the major programming and scripting languages like JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, C, C#, C++ and many more. Moreover, you can even use the Snipplr Textmate bundle to insert snippets directly into your code without ever having to open your web browser.

3. Project Euler and Code Golf

Solving puzzles and challenging problems has always been an integral part of coding. Whether for fun or serious self-improvement, Project Euler and Code Golf are probably the best resources when it comes to challenging problems. Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical and computer programming problems whereas Code Golf allows you to show off your code-fu by trying to solve coding problems using the least number of keystrokes. Do check them out!

4. Github and Google Code

By coding in open source projects, you’ll not only add value to your resume, but also learn a lot from fellow developers. You can find many interesting projects on Github and Google Code to sharpen your coding skills!

6. Quickly Code

Quickly code is a collection of cheat sheets in various programming languages. Very handy indeed!

If you’re first coming to these resources through this post, for sure you’re going to be blown away at how helpful they are. More experienced coders are probably already aware of these resources, and may know more. Which sites have you found most beneficial for coding? Feel free to drop a link in the comments.

Until next time, happy coding!

Press materials for the SDK announcement.

In 2007, the first iPhone was introduced sans support for 3^rd party apps, which was quite a shock for us being – *ahem* – the 3^rd party.  But in March 2008 Apple pulled a complete 180, releasing the first SDK for iPhone with a super dev-friendly feature set that changed the playing field overnight.  To find our sea legs with the shiny new iPhone developer tools, we decided right then on our first internal iPhone project: a kick-ass clock with stylish graphical design and razor sharp user experience, called Night Stand.

The, erm... 'iconic' Night Stand icon.

The de facto iPhone standard for not only what a clock looks like, but how one functions, too.

Once unleashed, the dev team for Night Stand moved like a pack of badgers on home brew amphetamine.  Years of experience in user interface design and programming for OS X paid off bigtime with the transition to iPhone, and before the year was out Sourcebits had birthed its new iPhone-centric division: Spoonjuice, with its first app, Night Stand, cruising to number one in the Utilities category.  We had no idea at the time, but Night Stand would soon be downloaded over 3M times, receive heaps of critical acclaim in the press, and set the de facto standard for not only what a clock utility looks like on iPhone, but also how one functions.

The now-mandatory LCD clockface, a Night Stand original.

Pruning the interface like a bonsai tree.

Just how awesome is Night Stand?  If imitation is any indication, well, pretty frikkin awesome.  Starting with a bold, signature app icon and one gorgeously crafted timeface for v1.0, Night Stand set the motifs that continue to dominate even now among the over 200 clocks available today on the App Store.  Yup, you read that right: over 200.

But you don’t become Number 1 by luck.  You innovate.  And to do that you gather people with creativity and vision to drive the design.  For Night Stand, we put in place what soon became the Spoonjuice permanent core: a freakish assemblage of award-winning user interface geeks, icon alchemists, and over-caffeinated code zombies.  And with each wireframe came new iterations of the design, endless economizing of taps and swipes, pruning the interface like a bonsai tree down to its barest essence.

Metanoia

Classic LCD

Geek-friendly Binary, with beautiful, subtle animations.

Fierce self control.

From the beginning, Night Stand’s strong suit has been its simplicity: an extraordinarily beautiful clock, purposefully and lovingly designed, sans distraction.  Over time, with the introduction of several new clockfaces and increasingly rich feature set, it would have been easy to compromise on the interface.  But even now, approaching the landmark third version, nothing has changed on the surface.  You have to admire such fierce self control.  Especially considering what our competition has been regurgitating:

no comment.... ~_~

HD for everyone.

At the end of the day, despite the relentless stream of imitations, hyper-saturation of clock utilities in the App Store and swarm of crippled freebies from our rivals, Night Stand consistently reaches the Top 50 in the biggest markets while grabbing the #1 spot in at least 5 other stores internationally.  Daily.  And in our view, this is just the beginning.  With the next update for iPhone bringing in the high-end features of the best-selling HD version for iPad, everyone best buckle up.  We’re on track for another lightspeed jump ahead of the riffraff.

Beautiful, minimal Milk.

The new Night Stand world clock: peerless design and animation.

A new, unreleased theme... you'll have to see it to believe it. @_@

I updated my Violet Violence desktop picture to iPad format a couple days ago, and whilst digging through my stuff I found a few more pieces that I thought were worth sharing. Go on then, click this bunch of iPads hugging each other below to download. Nine wallpapers, twelve megabytes. Violet Violence itself is 5.2 MB, zoom.

I hope they don’t make your devices explode!

Take good care of your egg and before long you’ll be training up a scrappy little hatchling: Rocky-style.  Keep him healthy and happy as you navigate the challenges of his formative years, then – when the time is right – watch him explode into full bore bad-ass adult battle chicken.  Seriously.  This is a capital-f Fun game.

(l-r) Hatchling to Battle Veteran, plus Crab-apple and Bog Walker

Beast Farmer has a lot going for it, a real kitchen sink of an iPhone game: familiar 2D platforming, lush 3D character rendering, classic arcade fighting and über-cute digital pet care.

Swamp Chicken: Digital Pet for the iPhone Generation

2D Platforming

Swamp Chicken vs Bog Walker

To these, Sourcebits added a generous helping of peerless graphic and interactive design, expert engineering and quality assurance. Then, with all those pieces in place, Beast Farmer ferociously debuted across the App Store worldwide, devouring the competition while racing up the charts from Japan to Canada to the UK. Now 3 days into its launch, Beast Farmer ranks in the Top 5 games in no fewer than 30 countries’ App Stores, and is the No 1 game in 15 countries. Yup. Over 50,000 downloads in 2 days. That’s a lot of crazed, squawking swamp chickens.

When Industrial Brothers brought their Beast Farmer artwork and gameplay concepts to Sourcebits back in January they came in with a strong vision and sense of direction, the kinds of qualities that lead to a terrific development collaboration.  After initial consultations the contracts were inked, then engineers and project managers from both sides began hammering out the v1.0 feature set and timetable to take us from POC to a working alpha.  Then, after several months and round after round of internal beta testing and QA, the game was finally submitted and published on the App Store for an out of this world launch.

As with all our iPhone app development, whether games, utilities, or lifestyle-oriented, meeting with clients, getting to the core of their product, fleshing out their vision through expert engineering and pushing the technological limits of whichever platform we’re publishing for, fine tuning the interactive as well as graphical design, testing, more testing, reengineering, then testing some more, these things are what we do best, and what makes Sourcebits the go-to company for third-party app dev.  It’s been amazing working with Industrial Brothers so far and we can’t wait for you to see what’s coming next.  Stay tuned!

One Screenful at a Time, Please

One of our senior interface designers, Na Wong, fronts with strong shapes and bold, form-filling graphics.  Top and bottom nav bars frame the main window while inset vertical text on the left provides a subtle anchor for the dynamic content.  A muted background with soft noise draws the eye to the colorful featured work.

Another Sourcebits UI designer, Austria-based Philipp Antoni, takes the same strong centered rectangle tack but with multiple layers and vertical text navigation on the left.  As with Na’s design, featured graphical content leaps out from the main window set against a neutral background.

Lou Mantia’s site takes a stark, minimal approach along the same lines, with a massive centered rectangle on white and discrete text-based top nav.  Big, bright, saturated graphics instantly draw the eye, and note the logotype fill changing dynamically with the featured content.  A simple, yet awesomely creative touch.

Though not a designer’s page, the site for this year’s Iconfest (which we can’t wait for) takes a similarly minimal, rectangular route, with baby blue Bookman out front.

We also have Miles Ponson’s Californian Design, eschewing nav bars altogether and going with another recent UI meme: iPhone page indicators as clickable nav buttons.  And these – it must be said – do not port well to mouse-based interfaces.  If you’re using them for anything other than page indicators, please stop.  Now.

Also worth noting is Jonas Rask’s vertical rectangle, and on the non-rectangle front, we have another Sourcebits user interface designer, Edward Scherf, with speak-for-themselves 512×512 icons in distinctive bold shapes front and center.

David Lanham takes a gallery approach with a dusky, textured background and vibrant, almost glowing colors drawing the eye to four content-filled frames.

And finally, iconpaper.org features bold, black-framed squares on a 3×3 grid with bright, beautiful thumbs that simply leap from the page.  At the top of the grid you’ll find a minimal nav bar consisting of a few well-designed, glyph-like icons, and down at the bottom note the large, clearly purposed horizontal slider that keeps your eyes comfortably pinned to the single, gorgeous screenful of content.

Chunky

Chunking information into parcels of easily consumed content is nothing new, and at the ‘screenful’ level clearly works for showcasing a design portfolio.  But why stop there?  Anything that can be browsed is a candidate for chunking into screenfuls.  Online retail, text-heavy news and blog sites, rich media content – the top designers are already re-imagining the next generation of user experiences.

And Sourcebits has the best.  Yes, hands down, the best interface designers in the industry – several of them highlighted right here on this page.  Their passion for interface design is matched only by the laser guided Art direction of our own Apple Design Award winner Piotr Gajos.

Piotr and the design team, together with our squad of technophile engineers and programmers spend each and every day building stunning, intuitive interfaces for everyone from small app shops to Fortune 500 companies like GE and Coca Cola.  Check out some of our client pages below:

Companion site to Knocking Live Video, the best-selling app for iPhone and Android.

The Spoonjuice page, with dynamic top nav bar and main window content, incredibly intuitive and space-efficient.

Microsite for voice actor Kevin Doherty.  Hidden within the minimal interface are a custom mp3 player and smooth jQuery slide effects.

Drop us a line.  Let’s talk about the design of your next project.

It’s Social

One of the keys to mobile app success these days is enabling users to share content instantly via the social Web.  And surely that goes double for a mobile Web browser.

If we didn’t build Skyfire with one-touch access to your Twitter app of choice, Facebook Wall, IM service or email we would hardly consider it a finished application.

Lets You Explore

Skyfire fetches new media you’re going to love.  Say you’re scanning a bit about umbrella-wielding Britney, hit the Explore button and Skyfire sifts through YouTube, Twitter, Digg, and other sites for yet more text/video/pics of, yes, umbrella-wielding Britney. :S  It’s a handy way of letting users find more of what they’re interested in, and one more reason for them to set Skyfire as their default browser.

Killer Feature(s!!)

Now here are the crown jewels.  What’s the first thing everyone looks for in a Web browser?  Speed.  And Skyfire delivers – full throttle.  Hands down the fastest browser for Android, Skyfire renders pages far quicker than Android’s built-in browser or other third party apps, including just-released Opera Mini.  So yeah, it’s crazy fast, but our Android developers went the extra mile to ensure flawless 1:1 page rendering and scaling – complete with pinch to zoom, another first on Android!

But the feature that’s got everyone hot and bothered is Flash video.  Yup, thanks to some clever cloud-based wizardry, Skyfire is the first mobile browser to bring Flash video to Android.  Any time you land on a page with embedded Flash vid, a tiny popup will let you begin streaming it to your handset in gloriously rendered full screen.  And this is where the cloud comes in.  Skyfire doesn’t blast your handset with battery-choking, processor-crushing Flash video.  Instead, our servers instantly convert your Flash request to Web-friendly HTML5 video and beam the much lighter stream – 70% lighter! – back to your phone for smooth, desktop-like viewing pleasure.  And HTML5 video is not only easier on your battery than Flash, but also friendlier to your bandwidth consumption over the network.

So right there, we’ve got not one, but TWO Skyfire-exclusive killer features no other app can match.  And there’s more, but we don’t want to spoil it for you.  If you still haven’t tried Skyfire 2 on your Android handset, it’s awesome and free… so run along now.  Go get it!

Our own Brian Meehan returns from last week’s ThinkMobile 2010 in New York City to share his talk about Sourcebits’ recipe for App Store success.  With examples from our best-selling app for iPhone and Android, Knocking Live Video, Brian outlines 10 key ingredients of what he calls ‘WOW’ apps.

1.  A Killer Feature – i.e. the first cross-platform live phone to phone video feeds.

2.  Utilizes Core Functions – Make the most of what you’ve got. iPhone developers enjoy a unique feature set including Core Location, Accelerometer, and the most accurate multi-touch display on the market. Harness their power and reap the reward.

3.  No Proximity Limitations – At the heart of iPhone and iPod touch beats the most advanced wireless Internet device in the world. What separates a WOW fart app from a ‘Push button to fart’ app? Virtually pulling someone’s finger 6 time zones and 5000 km away. In Knocking Live Video we exploited the same basic premise: anywhere, anytime live video with friends and family.

4.  Intuitive Design – Users should never be more than 3 steps from any given action. A dedicated, talented user interface design team is essential.

5.  Social Viral Power – Will people want to show their friends? A WOW app generates social chatter, both on and offline.

6.  Social Tools to Catapult Your App – You may have a great app, but if it doesn’t offer instant access to Facebook or Twitter you’re handicapping it from out the gate.

7.  Sustainable Engagement – Whether sharing live video of baby with grandma and grandpa or enabling long distance shopping, a WOW app becomes a fixture in users’ lives.

8.  Works Cross-Platform – Don’t hobble your app by pegging it to one platform. Develop for multiple devices.

9.  Choose Wisely – Not only do we need to choose which platforms, handsets and carriers to optimize for, but which category to dominate in the App Store, Android Marketplace or BlackBerry App World. Muscling in on a popular category like ‘Games’ for example, will take more marketing oomph than lower lying fruit like ‘Lifestyle’ or ‘Education’.

10.  An Episodic Launch Plan – WOW apps don’t launch themselves. Coordinating blog and Tweet teams, PR releases with the relevant media outlets, on and offline event appearances, carrier promotion, etc all take careful planning. Launching without a plan is no plan for success.

Check out our streamlined new mobile page, live at http://m.sourcebits.com. 100% iPhone-optimized, rocks da house on Android and WebOS. Dig the barely there animations and intuitive touch-friendly UI controls. Sticking to a clean, less is more esthetic, all the key content of our main page is available but never more than a tap or two away. We spent a long time fine-tuning the entire experience, and along with Gmail and Flickr, we think it’s one of the top mobile Web experiences.

Duh.  ;D

All through 2009, our iPhone apps featured regularly in the top spots at the App Store with many being staff-picked by Apple. Our Mac lineup, too, enjoyed the same attention with regular staff picks on the downloads page at apple.com. Yes, it’s been an outstanding year, with – all told – around 5 million downloads, an expanded staff of 200(!!), and over 500 unique inquiries for our contract development services. And as we’ve grown, so too has interest in our back story from individuals and smaller dev houses, so I’m going to take the remainder of this post to talk about our arrival as one of the top contract dev companies in the world. Huzzah!

We founded Sourcebits in early 2006, just three of us, with a background in medicine and software design, and immediately set to work producing Mac software focusing on the niche we were most familiar with: healthcare services. At that time the Mac was gaining big traction among mainstream PC users, beginning to gobble up serious mindshare if not market share, and so we began the business of porting Win-based health-related apps to Mac, and soon after porting PowerPC apps to Intel as Apple began transitioning their chip architecture. We made decent trade doing this for most of the year, but as 2007 approached we started getting many inquiries for Web and application development, more so than the healthcare related stuff.

In particular, we started getting requests from game makers and hardware vendors to port their apps and drivers over from Windows, which turned out to be a crucial milestone. We spent several months working on a bunch of ports, and all this porting gave our dev teams a massive new skill set in all the associated technologies, so in a pretty short stretch our guys became fluent in a huge range of database, graphical and interface APIs that we’d never really planned for. And as the applications became increasingly complex we also began focusing on the UI side, hiring a team of heavyweight icon and interface designers. At the same time we were also investing heavily in Adobe-based RIA and came out with a bunch of cool cross-platform apps like GeeMail, which cnet.com reviewed as offering an even better solution than Google for offline mail browsing. All this expertise, along with further inroads into RIA and new art direction proved crucial as Apple revealed the iPhone in late October.

It didn’t start out roses, though. At the beginning, with no App Store and no SDK, we were limited to peddling Web apps with no real earning potential. Remember, this was announced during the Worldwide Developer’s Conference… and I remember developers actually booing Steve during this part of his presentation. But we plugged away and got really really good at making Web apps, like one of the first ever Web-based image editors, PixelPerfect, and Tangled Decals, which showcases a cool new online shopping experience. But 5 months later that was so much water under the bridge as Apple revealed the SDK and the App Store for the first time. And this was the moment of 2008. The SDK and the App Store blew us all away. We never imagined we’d have such flexibility and power to create for iPhone, not after the Web apps fiasco, and our instant reaction was: oh yes more please thank you!!

Everything we’d been working on the past two years, the driver porting, game porting, UI design, the contract work making original Mac and Web apps, all this combined to put us in a spectacular front-running position for iPhone development. And Sourcebits was thrilled to join the first round of Apple-certified iPhone developers in March 2008, snagging one of just 3000 initial licenses.

By September we’d published our first iPhone game, the Plateau, which was a huge critical and commercial hit, but this paled compared to our next app, Night Stand, which reached the Top 3 on the US App Store in November, and even now continues to be a steady earner. We pushed ourselves to push the tech, coming up with Fun Booth, the first face-tracking app for iPhone – the kind of app that has been copied literally dozens of times, and Knocking Live Video, the first ever video chat app for iPhone – a feat not even Apple has pulled off yet. And we expanded our contract development services for iPhone and increased our staff of engineers and designers to 200. With renewed capacity and the iPhone wind at our backs, before the year was out Sourcebits was designing original apps for everyone from small idea labs to Sling Media, to Fortune 500 companies like General Electric and Coca Cola.

In 2009, with Google, Palm and Blackberry releasing SDKs and App Stores of their own, we also began porting our more popular iPhone apps over to these platforms. And on Android we’re already a category leader with Night Stand and hands down the best Facebook app for the platform: AndroidBook. We’re going to replicate the kind of synergy that led to our success with iPhone, in terms of design sense, proficiencies in programming and APIs, and expertise in the broader technologies. So for now we’re not about short-term profit taking on Android or elsewhere. We’re taking the long view and getting our crew up to speed in all directions. So if you’re looking for some take-away from our success so far, it’s simple: be prepared.

The official Adobe press release states:

With support for the Android™ platform expected in 2010, AIR provides developers with a feature-rich environment for delivering rich applications outside the mobile browser and across multiple operating systems via mobile marketplaces and app stores.

What does the release mean to mobile developers? With the introduction of AIR on popular mobile devices, you have a killer development platform. Here are three of the reasons:

i. Write once, deploy anywhere
Developers would not have to worry about porting their apps for different devices.

ii. Reduced development time
Adobe Flash provides an IDE that enables the development of very rich UI and interactive apps in a short period of time.

iii. Better than Java for application development (on mobile devices)
Considering the resource usage and GUI library, Adobe AIR comes out as a better choice for app development on mobile devices.

Kevin Hoyt of Adobe demonstrates the Tweet Card app on Motorola Droid.

Though the iPhone OS may not officially support AIR, there’s a workaround to the issue – Packager for iPhone in the Adobe Flash CS5. The Packager for iPhone makes it possible to create native applications for the iPhone OS from Adobe Flash.

With the iPhone issue handled, and the AIR platform on all other mobile devices, Adobe Flash stands as a very strong candidate for commercial mobile development platform in the coming future. The new development will bring in a lot of talented artists and developers from the Flash side of the fence, and we should see a lot of exciting development on the mobile platform – starting with Android.

BANGALORE, India – December 22, 2009 – Sourcebits, one of the world’s top destinations for iPhone, Mac, Android and Web software development, today revealed a case study that outlines their approach to developing a highly successful photo sharing iPhone application, Knocking™ Live Pic Sharing, for Pointy Heads Software. The study explores the critical role that Sourcebits played in the development of Knocking Live Pic Sharing, an easy-to-use photo sharing tool where users can share extensive albums without long download times. Knocking Live Pic Sharing launched on the App Store in November 2009 and was listed in the Top 50 iPhone Apps just two days following its debut. In the first four weeks since the application launched, over 20,000 units of Knocking Live Pic Sharing were downloaded from the iPhone App Store.

Pointy Heads Software, an independent software development company that specializes in iPhone application development, sought to create a streamlined photo sharing application for the iPhone platform that could overcome the limitations of the current multimedia messaging service (MMS), which only allows users to send up to five photos at a time through a painstakingly slow sending process. Brian Meehan, co-founder of Pointy Heads Software, partnered with Sourcebits in August 2009 to develop a solution to solve this complex technical challenge.

By partnering with Sourcebits, Pointy Heads Software was able to launch the well-received Knocking Live Pic Sharing photo sharing iPhone application that successfully leverages a combination of wireless technologies, an innovative design and unparalleled user experience.

“The Sourcebits team not only presented us with a creative solution for surpassing the iPhone’s ‘five image’ barrier, they also delivered a world-class development experience that allowed us to continue to keep focused on the objective of the application throughout the development process,” said Brian Meehan, co-founder of Pointy Heads Software.

Knocking Live Pic Sharing is available for free on the App Store. To download the app, visit: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id335489277?mt=8

About Sourcebits

Sourcebits is a software development company with offices in Bangalore, India and Atlanta, USA. Established in April 2006 with just four developers, the company has grown to over two hundred developers and a talented crew of designers in just four years. Sourcebits has quickly become one of the world’s top destinations for iPhone, Mac, Android and Web software development. Headquartered in the Silicon Valley of India, Sourcebits is at the bleeding edge of emerging technologies. For more information, please visit www.sourcebits.com.

This post is an extract of message which I posted on Sourcebits’ internal Basecamp a while ago. It serves as our small library of wisdom, which each designer can access whenever they want and hopefully find answers to unknowns we stumble upon every once in a while. It has been helpful for us and we decided to share it with the world. Hoping that you don’t know some of the items and they will help you build better designs.

1. Apple Human Interface Guidelines

This is the number one resource for any designer – be it UI designer, web designer or even print designer. This document is a fantastic study on human behaviors when interacting with machines. Tons of VERY useful information. You should know it by heart!

2009-08-20 Version (Snow Leopard), Online
2006-10-03 Version (Tiger), PDF — This version contains UI metrics
1995 Version (OS 9), PDF (this one is quite funny, for reference)

2. Apple iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Same as above but focused on this small, ugly phone from Apple.

Go to website or Download PDF

3. Android User Interface Guidelines

This document can serve two purposes: 1) it can teach you how to make proper UIs for Android and 2) when compared against Apple’s documents, it can show many extremely interesting similarities and differences in both approaches.

Go to website

4. First Principles of Interaction Design

A webpage with very precious information about how to design interactivity: behaviors, actions, feedback, characteristics and Fitts’ Law.

Go to website

5. Vision and Reality of Hypertext and Graphical User Interfaces

More about Fitts’ Law! This is an absolutely amazing thesis about human-machine interaction written by Matthias Müller-Prove from Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg. Pay attention to chapters 3 and 4. And learn Fitts’ Law by heart, it has huge implications in any kind of UI design.

Go to website

6. Information Design Patterns

Absolutely fantastic website about how to visually present various types of information. A must read!

Go to website

7. 10 Useful Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs

Nice article on Smashing Magazine. A few useful tips on general UI design and web design.

Go to website

8. useit.com

This is a treasure. Tons of fantastic articles about usability. A gem! Teaches you what NOT to do when you’re designing.

Go to website

9. Eyetrack III

How does the human eye perceive information? A page about psychology of perception, cognition directions, colors et caetera. Helps you understand how to build more effective, sensible and easy-to-use designs.

Go to website

10. Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

• Minimize the number of text fields in your interfaces down to the absolute minimum necessary.
• Minimize the number of click/keystrokes/gestures necessary to accomplish actions in your interface.
• Make your interface as responsive as possible – minimize the latency of each and every action a user might take in your interface.

Go to website

11. Good design in ten commandments

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design helps a product to be understood

Go to website

12. What is usability?

Usability is defined by five quality components:

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Go to website

13. How people really use the iPhone?

We all love philosophy, theories, discussions, assumptions and decisions based on our expertise. So wrong! Lukas Mathis from ignorethecode stresses the importance of usability tests and I tend to agree. There’s nothing worse than a Mister I-Know-It-All Designer who claims that he’s got all user experience patterns in his small finger. In fact I think the more designer admits that he can make a mistake, the better he is. Consciousness of limits in this job is crucial because our work is used by millions of very different people. And it is absolutely impossible for a single person to objectify a design. Hence usability tests! Here is one quite interesting, it can serve as an example on how to perform such tests.

Go to website

This list keeps growing as I roam through the web and find knowledge which helps me understand what is user interface design and how to approach it. Expect this post to be updated and feel free to add resources which you find useful — let’s share the wealth!

Link to The Plateau: http://apps.facebook.com/theplateau

This is Piotr, VP of Design at Sourcebits. I’d like to take this opportunity and talk a little bit about our design team. Why would I do that? Well, to be honest — there’s quite a lot to brag about!

My goal when I was beginning to complete the team was to find the best people from different environments. I was aiming to gather an eclectic, diverse and multicultural group of individuals. I have a strong belief that this method allows to create a very specific mix: dynamic, unique, able to approach problems from many angles and unpredictable (in terms of ideas of course!) And this is what I’m looking for in design: raw energy, unique ideas, dynamic and quick adjustment to ever-changing conditions and last but not least — fun.

Today I’m proud to be able to say this — we have managed to do it. I believe we found some of the best designers out there. They come from various places on the planet. Some of them claim they come from other planets. They have completely different cultural backgrounds, habits and native languages. And believe me, they are talented!

So here they are, the All-Stars design team of Sourcebits (in alphabetical order so no one blames me for preferences!)

Adam Cartlidge (Ireland)

Adam has a quite unusual affinity for chaos. He designs websites which explode with energy, sudden clashes of colours and compositions which result with mind-bending results and neat typography. He also finds himself comfortable in any other type of design: throw it at him and he comes back with a hard (yet polished, ha) blow of creativity and sexiness. He learns very quickly and recently has proven immense iPhone UI design powers.

David Forgash (USA)

Also known as Dave-O, the mighty ruler of MacThemes forums. Dave is a little strange and we’re afraid of him. You rarely meet a person who has lasers instead of eyes, right? Well, Dave’s ability to find flaws and/or room for improvement in design is astounding. He’s been flooding us with epic rivers of feedback from day one. And being the geeks we are, we can’t get enough of it. He’s also a bit of a pixel gentleman – he chooses to push them gently instead of maniacally throwing around. The results are pleasing. And on time, yay!

Benjamin George (India)

Our young icon artist and iPhone UI designer. He juggles pixels with ease and grace. Has no fear when dealing with piling requirements and is always positive. He’s the good little spirit of the team.

Daniel Goffin (Germany)

Dan is certainly a one-of-a-kind. He started his adventure with pixels probably before the time began. Surfaced around 2004, when he shocked the whole Mac theming community with his completely unique approach to GUIKit’ting — Sweet Slumber theme. After that he was recognized by his illustrative and wonky icons, book covers for Classics iPhone app and finally a wide range of funky, scary, twisted toys. Now he’s diving back into UI and game design — sketching, brainstorming, drawing and researching.

Gary Jacob Howe (UK)

Gary came from brand and print design background, and converted into an excellent UI designer with grace and speed. These days, he’s becoming more and more independent. He initiates projects, recognizes requirements, panics and runs. But then we grab him, put back at his desk and he does magnificent job guiding clients through challenging projects, providing English-proper user interfaces and pretty visuals. Gary is versatile and comes up with so much initiative that sometimes I have to stop him!

Alessandro Marani (Italy)

We don’t know much about Alessandro except for the fact that he probably lives in Italy, he probably looks like Alec Baldwin and for sure he has amazing illustration talents. He’s secretly drawing, painting and animating very pretty and funny things with us…and we can’t wait to show it all to you.

Rick Patrick (UK)

The Ominous Richard, they call him. As he writes on his Twitter profile: “Bad design makes me all kinds of sad.” And that’s it. Rick has the unique ability to tell what’s right and what’s wrong. He’s on constant search for new experiences in the world of design. He does UI, visuals, web design, interactions, 3D…he can even script game events! Very passionate and uniquely creative.

Sourav Sagar Panda, Shemin Krishnan and Udaya Shankar (India)

The main heads of our 3D team. Don’t be misguided with that rather playful last name. Sourav is a pro of all pros as far as 3D design is concerned. He has polygons for breakfast and breathes with shaders. His observation skill is uniquely sharp and his feel for harmonious colours makes him a very good painter too. Shemin has a black belt in After-Effects-Aided-Reality-Bending and some rumors say that people saw him rigging a real human being. And Udaya is an entitled artist, shooting ideas and polygons with the speed of light.

Raghavendra Shet (India)

Raghav is one of these guys: he comes to the office in Bangalore, sits down quietly and without questions produces solid user interfaces and then dresses them up in wonderful visuals. Independent, open-minded and very eager to learn. It’s a kind of a person you need on your team if you want to remain sane. Oh, and also was the Gold Medalist in the 4th National Level All India Painting Competition in 2000!

Alexander Stremiakov and Alexander Tsibulski (Belarus and Russia)

Our another European secret weapon. Alex S. lives in Belarus. Alex T. lives in Russia. Both are heavy-weight interaction designers. And by heavy-weight I mean really serious. Like, they are ninjas. I’m not kidding, I saw them kill a whole city with their swords once. Their excellent analytic skills, ability to squeeze the last problem out of an interface and sharp eye for logical defects make our projects sensible, organized and highly usable. Their skills also make the whole development process easy to understand for both developers and the client.

Nikolay Verin (Russia)

Russia is taking over Sourcebits! Nikolay is an absolutely amazing icon designer. He has a degree in arts, loves to paint, listens almost exclusively to U2 and is kind enough to show his design process to the world by creating fantastically educational YouTube tutorials. We grabbed him, mesmerized by his attention to detail, feeling of depth, contrast and colors. Needless to say, we’re super happy to have this mad artist. Here’s to hope his skills will pour over to iOS UI design, where we hope Nikolay will shine.

Julian Wright, Saravana Prabhu, Jeevan Lazarus and Ashwin Dinesh (India)

This is our excellent 5-men-design-army. They kick out iOS UIs, slice resources like there’s no tomorrow, make pretty illustrations and generally keep up being badass designers all the time. All of them are silent, humble and undoubtedly — indispensable. Also, they usually complete their tasks ahead of deadlines. How cool is that!

Ding Yi and Neway Lau (China)

Two not-certainly-direct relatives of one of the Chinese emperors, Yi and Neway proud themselves to be the most efficient and paranoid iOS UI designers on this planet. Efficient, because they can kick an app the size of Baltimore in half an hour. Paranoid, because they notice flaws which aren’t even there and manage to correct them(!!) They’re two shiny stars in our constellation. We love them and we wish we could clone them.

And in the end… I’m not sure if it’s entirely appropriate but I’ll say it for the sake of completeness of the impression: yours truly won an Apple Design Award in 2006 and happens to be completely obsessed with details, organization and unusual solutions. I was also gifted with quite good communication skills which allow me to steer this ship with efficiency, intensity, discipline and fun.

So there — I hope you enjoyed this insight in our All-Stars team. I am very excited to work with these fantastic (and fanatic!) people and am confident that we will achieve truly outstanding things.

Now we’ll go back and have more fun with pixels, if you don’t mind.

The Android, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform, a product of a group of 47 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience and this not only signals the coming of age of collaborative ventures by a world looking beyond proprietary Operating systems, but also gives a new meaning to Software portability.

Google Android platform is poised to make inroads in all walks of your life. The vision is clear – From SmartPhones, to NetBooks, to Desktops. It is just a matter of time before the invasion is complete.

Applications built with the Android SDK, can work on flavors of Linux, Windows and the Mac OS, bringing a vast resource pool of talent, to put their minds together for improving the quality of life through better applications in business and wholesome entertainment.

Come join us in this endeavour to share knowledge, and get solutions to the most vexing problems you face; Be on the Next Gen ‘bleeding edge’ of technology. Visit the latest Android Development Blog from Sourcebits now.

I’m proud to announce that our flagship iPhone application Night Stand was reviewed by the biggest online Mac magazine — Macworld. Rob de la Cretaz gave our baby 4 of 5 stars! Have a look at the excerpt of the review:

“Something I really love about new technology is the possibility that it’s so revolutionary, it replaces things that have been commonplace in our lives for a long time. The iPhone is no exception to this, as it has found a way to take over the roles of all sorts of things we hold near and dear. Thanks to Night Stand, you can add digital alarm clock to that list.”

To read more, head over to Macworld website.

Thanks to Macworld for such a nice review and as always — big thanks to all of our users for splendid feedback and ongoing support. You rule!

To celebrate the release of new Sourcebits website, I have decided to prepare a few goodies for you. This week I present you with Violet Violence a desktop picture with organic waves motif from our Nerve Store website design.

Click the preview to download:

This desktop picture comes in PNG format (3,6 MB), 2560 x 1600 resolution. Feel free to resize/crop it for personal use.

This is my first post here, so let me introduce myself — I am Piotr, the new art director at Sourcebits. My job is to make sure that pixels ordered by you look lovely and make sense

I’d like to share a few things I discovered about Photoshop CS4. It’s a result of research driven by madness, irritation and disappointment.

Getting crashes?

I found out that major culprit in Photoshop CS4 is flaky OpenGL support. They didn’t get it right, what is more: it looks like they shipped a product which hardly supports OpenGL. If you look at Adobe support documents, 95% of solutions for common problems state one thing: disable OpenGL. Remaining 5% of solutions say: update your graphic card drivers. How do I do that on a Mac? Oh, I forgot — you can’t, there is no notion of ‘drivers’ in OS X. Neat. My Photoshop was crashing like crazy so I decided to give disabling OpenGL a go.

Simply go to Photoshop Preferences > Performance and uncheck Enable OpenGL Drawing checkbox. Restart, spend some time working and see if it makes any difference. It did for me!

There is a drawback to this method. You will lose all OpenGL-related features like:

• Color matching across displays: it doesn’t work correctly anyway.
• Canvas rotation tool: it’s buggy as hell, blurs images when used. Useless! It’s difficult not to mention that Corel Painter has had this feature for years and it works flawlessly.
• Pixel grid: it’s pointless since you can set regular grid to 1 by 1 px. Plus, it’s buggy: in some situations selection marquee and guides don’t match with gridlines. Ugh!
• Smooth zoom: just eyecandy. Nothing critical in daily use. And can be irritating.

More crashes?

There is one persistent crash that happens even if you disable OpenGL. When working on a complex project (many vector layers, layer groups and layer effects) and you use Layer > Duplicate Group… command, or actually: any function related to layer duplicating. After using it 3 or 4 times, Photoshop explodes.

Nice.

How to make life bearable with this flaw then? Enter EverSave: a very neat Mac application which adds auto-save functionality to any application in your system!

Check out this baby!

It’s free and it really works! I have set mine to save automatically every 2 minutes and Itve been much more relaxed about my work since then.

I hope this stuff helps. If you have any other problems with CS4 apps, ask here: I might be able to help you out.

And if you want to find out a bit more why and how Adobe is a bunch of amateurs, check out this blog

GeeMail is developed for the AIR runtime using the PureMVC ActionScript 3.0 framework.

Live Quotes is a feature-rich tool for those interested in the stock market. Live Quotes features an intuitive user interface for adding stock symbols of your interest and displaying the relevant stock data associated with them.

 It can track stock data second by second, compare data between any two given dates; which can be represented in five different chart types to help you in data analysis and price comparison.

Live Quotes is an AIR application developed using the PureMVC ActionScript 3.0 framework.

And the icing on the cake is, the article made it to the Digg Front Page, a first for our brand SpoonJuice.

A few excerpts from the review:

“What I found so intoxicating about the Plateau was that the reward was just playing the game. “

“The Plateau is achingly beautiful.”

“Yes, I’m gushing over the Plateau, but I cannot help it.”

Check the review here: The Plateau Review by ign.com

Mac Games Arcade 1.0 is now shipping! Nearly 400 digital download Mac games are now available at your fingertips. In celebration of the release, Mac Games Arcade is offering 5 free games. One free game will be made available each day for the next 5 days.

Friday: Pangea Arcade – coupon code: freegame1 (expires Saturday)
Saturday: Bullet Candy – coupon coming Saturday
Sunday: Rocket Bowl – coupon coming Sunday
Monday: Platypus – coupon coming Monday
Tuesday: Nanny Mania – coupon coming Tuesday

The Plateau is a non-area, a corridor between worlds.
Immerse yourself in the mind-bending space challenge. Unravel holographic structures of orbs connected with glowing lines to find your way through unknown origins of the outer space.

Features:
Choose heads or bodies from your existing photos or the photos we provide
Add new heads or bodies using your iPhone’s camera
Choose from several BobbleHead sounds
Save your BobbleHead to your photo library

You can find more info about the application here

Change list includes:
1. Complete apple script support to automate your dmg production without ever touching the graphics interface

2. Support for grid functionality to completely control the objects within DMG container

3. Exciting new DMG templates

4. Numerous bug fixes and overall interface improvement.

What is great about DMG Architect:

Easily add your own custom window backgrounds, files and icons.

Total WYSIWYG control of everything including background image and window location.

Use any image for your container icon, not just ,ICNS files. Even change the icon of files already added to a project.

No artwork > No Problem. Choose a theme from our gallery of backdrops and icons.

Add and update text without editing your background images.

Add encryption for extra protection.

Putting legal notices for your software is simple.

Burn your project directly to CD or DVD.

Release your project as a tamper-proof disk image.

A full demo is available at Sourcebits’s website. DMG Architect is priced at $29.99 and is available from Sourcebits site.

‘Google Chrome’ is a new web browser from Google which is open source and based on open source ‘Web-Kit’ rendering engine. Google Chrome is focused on today’s web-development which is service based, it translates into most of web pages act like web applications rather than simple web pages.

Google Chrome is blend of best features present in other browsers as well new ones. it also introduces some recognizable GUI changes. Screen shots of Google chrome can be found here. Google has also published a comic book on this baby. This is beta download link as specified by Google (its different issue its not working for me).

I’ll be digging further into other features of Google Chrome but for now have glimpse of few features of it. Chrome has ‘Speed Dial’ as in Opera and in Firefox with help of some plug in. Tabs will be located at top of window, not bellow address-bar, they call it natural flow, tabs can be moved from one window to another without changing the states. Address-bar incorporates search sugests, history and bookmark search as well.

Google Chrome provide seamless integration with GoogleDocs and probably other Google services.
Most charming feature i found is if any web-app crashes inside browser it’ll not affect browser and browser will not close. Google Chrome employs multithreding and better memory management and sums up with ‘Task Manager’ so user can see which website or browser component (e.g. Plug-in) is using how much memory.

Since JavaScript is so much important to work for today’s web applications, Google Chrome also ships “JavaScript Virtual Machine V8”.

Anyways Firefox 3 is not up to mark for me if compare with hype it collected, me too pledged for download day of Mozilla but its most unstable version i have ever seen. I believe only Google can help us to get rid of bad dreams of various avatars of IE.

The service behaves like a regional Twitter, but is geared towards sharing information rather than chatting – it’s sort of like a neighborhood bulletin board in the cloud. Instead of using a follow system, nrme makes all messages public to users within a 9 block radius (users can still private message each other if they’d like).

Thank you Smashing Mazagine

If one can remember, web-developer bloggers were scratching WebPages with content showing how evil is html 4.0 implementation in past and I swear, most of developers (no wonder if even today) were unaware of any proper difference between XHTML and HTML that time. With time all the effort shown its colour and I believe browser vendors are guilty for whatever is missing, or inconsistent from browser to browser support.
WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group)a community formed by giant browser vendors Safari, Opera, and Firefox, which is responsible for official HTML has submitted the reason of foundation of WHATWG, which reads founders of WHATWG are more concerned about real world web authors. It also specifies the reason why to walk-away from W3Org standards.

Every web-developer worth his salt is agree, its forced implementation of web-standards recommended by W3Org regarding mark-up writing and implementation of XHTML which shown the world glimpse of clean and crisp web, and same time it discouraged the spoilers of web.
Why an average web author will agree on separation of content and style until he is forced. I am agree on point raised that w3org is not very interested in introducing magic widgets for web-apps but why we don’t understand it’s filling more iron in base of structure of web. How one can be sure Web will be rendered identically and continue to render same way if implementations of standards are parallel and mutually exclusive, and worst if everyone is free to implement its own standard even if he is not sure for what standard stands for. I don’t understand why this backward compatibility still there if you are working for totally new thing, whose implementation itself needs mandatory updates of browsers. Like ‘MIME’ type issue, why not browser vendors just simply start supporting XHTML pages as ‘application/xhtml+xml’ instead of ‘text/html’? After all implementation of HTML 5 support will also take some proportion of effort, or vice-versa if W3org has approved specs of HTML5, why can’t they agree on serving ‘html’ pages with html DOCTYPE. Although DOCTYPE and strictness in structure must be required, not optional as in HTML5 specs. If one is so lazy and immature to follow the standard why he is allowed to do real development.

There is one more issue, if browsers stop supporting html, most of the web will be inaccessible, and to implement backward compatibility browsers can have more than one parser (e.g. Flash Player carries two interpreters) which I think already there, remember quirk modes?
Real 100% implementation of HTML5 as per of estimation of WHATWG may start from minimum 2022. It’s a long time block, then why they think there is a need of using old DOCTYPE while purpose of XHTML is purity and transition from messed up code to cleaner code based on standards so in future developer write only sensible mark-up and they don’t misuse the language. But HTML5 wants to continue to giving flexibility of uses to its authors. Strictness in use of mark-up is optional, not forced.

This flexibility adds enough confusion in mind of contemporary developers, because it’s hard to believe supporter of clean mark-up are now advertising ease of use for moron mark-up clerks.

Now it doesn’t matter one wants or not he has to choose from clean mark-up or feature rich mark-up (although both of them has a lot to introduce). Why can’t WHATWG support strictness of XHTML2.0 and rich features from HTML5? After all developers as well users both want functional and extensible mark-up which is easy to use and simple to develop and update, which can be plugged-in to any environment with consistent behaviour, regardless of platform.

As Eric Anderson says, developer’s priority is clean and maintainable code and customer’s priority is feature rich application, so what was needed is feature rich version of XHTML which is able to cater the needs of developer as well customer. I am start hating the situation, there will be time when drivers of web must have to choose either beautiful and dangerous or safe but dry path in web jungle.
Its long way to go do we still have time to merge HTML5 and XHTML 2 in order to give birth one almost perfect mark-up or it’s too late to understand the situation.

As per research the most memorable domain names on the net are the ones that are combination of meaningful words like Facebook (Face + Book), Basecamp (Base+Camp), Campfire (Camp+Fire), iPhone (i + Phone), etc..

MilkyDomain lets you find exactly these kind of domains, that are combination of meaningful words and are easy to remember.

Give it a try

Looking forward to making the Best Games / Applications on iPhone / iPod Touch.

We hope you will enjoy this site.

This exceptionally brilliant ‘feature’ may have nothing to do with me as a web developer, but the UI retardation was too much for me to resist making a remark on it.

In case you are wondering why I am using IE7, I just happened to be performing a cross-browser check (thanks to IE series) of a webpage when I was blessed with the heavenly experience of this advanced technological feature.

Change list includes:

• Complete apple script support to automate your dmg production without ever touching the graphics interface

• Support for grid functionality to completely control the objects within DMG container

• Exciting new DMG templates

• Numerous bug fixes and overall interface improvement.

What is great about DMG Architect:

• Easily add your own custom window backgrounds, files and icons.

• Total WYSIWYG control of everything including background image and window location.

• Use any image for your container icon, not just ,ICNS files. Even change the icon of files already added to a project.

• No artwork > No Problem. Choose a theme from our gallery of backdrops and icons.

• Add and update text without editing your background images.

• Add encryption for extra protection.

• Putting legal notices for your software is simple.

• Burn your project directly to CD or DVD.

• Release your project as a tamper-proof disk image.

A full demo is available at Sourcebits’s website. DMG Architect is priced at $29.99 and is available from Sourcebits site.

You can use the application on your iPhone using this URL

http://www.iclueless.com

More details about the product can be found here http://www.macxware.com/site/products/LDSPro/overview.html

A sample portfolio of the logos deisgned using this application can be viewed here
http://www.macxware.com/site/products/LDSPro/logosamples.html

Solution: Contain the input field in a relatively positioned div and absolute position the input field.

Rejoice!

This function will taken in a JSON string and return you a valid JavaScript object – without using eval(). Enjoy!

		function safeObject(s) {
			var o = new Object();
			var a0 = s.split(’,’);
			var al = a0.length-1;
			$.each(a0, function(i) {
				// First item
				if (i == 0) {
					var sl = this.length-1;
					var nv = this.substr(1, sl);
				}
				// Last item
				else if (i = al) {
					var sl = this.length-1;
					var nv = this.substr(0, sl);
				}
				// Mid items
				else { var nv = this; }
				nv = nv.replace(’ ‘, ‘’);
				var nvs = nv.split(’:’);
				o[nvs[0]] = nvs[1];
			});
			return o;
		}

John Resig might want to include this in the next release of jQuery.

1. How do I remove all the children from a DisplayObject (MovieClip etc)?

while (my_mc.numChildren) {
my_mc.removeChildAt(0);
}

2. How do I instantiate a class dynamicall?

import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;

var cs:String = ‘Part_’+i;
var DynamicClass:Class = flash.utils.getDefinitionByName(cs) as Class;
var tc:* = new DynamicClass();

3. How do I create a mirror image of a MovieClip?

my_mc.scaleX = -1; // mirror image
my_mc.scaleX = 1; // back to normal

I had a good time breaking my head over jQuery rendering bugs in Safari. Somehow I managed to find the fixes for the bugs I encountered. I hope this post will come handy to those who WILL come across the bugs. The fault is Safari’s.

Bug 1: Objects blink out when doing a fadeIn (basically a call to the animate function with opacity property) animation.
Bug 2: Objects dislocate when doing a fadeIn animation.

For bug no.1, when you select the empty space left by the object that disappeared, the object reappears most of them time. That hints, some axial action needs to be done on the object to make it reappear or prevent it from disappearing.

This is how we do it:

$(’#foo’).fadeIn(‘slow’, function() {
$(’#foo’).css(‘position’, ‘relative’).css(‘left’, 0).css(‘top’, 0);
});

We force a position property on it for an axial action with no real effect (left:0, top:0).

Bug no.2 gave me no hints as how I might fix it. But applying the same fix solved it.

I remember telling someone to try that fix for an unrelated bug resulting at the end of a jQuery animation. Don’t remember the details but looks like it fixed that too.

Universal fix for Safari jQuery bugs?

Besides this we will also post news about all the exciting products that we are developing in Soucebits and keep you updated.

So stay tuned ! and expect good things from us…