Things we liked this week:
Liam (cor, he’s a bit late to this one, but I’ll let him off…) liked PhoneGap – an HTML5 app platform that lets you write native applications for the popular mobile phone app stores. You basically write your app in HTML5, throw it to their build platform, and get a submission ready iPhone app. Sexy.
He also reckons that Mootools is better than jQuery: “…and that is a scientific fact that I can’t back up with facts other than a promise and a picture of a kitten”. Mootools 1.4.1 is now available and there is also a rather sexy modal framework for it available this week too. Go have a play.
Paul’s regular weekly FailWatch found this rather disturbing report: apparently the network of machines responsible for controlling the US’s fleet of drones has been compromised by key logging viruses that appear to be immune to attempts to remove them. Only this morning Paul then came across this piece describing how the unit’s officials kept things to themselves, neglecting to tell the 24th Airforce, who are supposed to be responsible for info-security in the USAF. Which is nice.
Paul’s next Fail: the Blackberry network went down for extended periods over two days (and I’m seeing more stuff in my Twitter stream which implies things are still not 100% sorted..) – and more coverage from the excellent Daily Mash.
…and his Final Fail: In a demonstration that you can recover from major fail without losing too much of your dignity, Netflix announced that they were backing out of their planned spinning off of the DVD part of the business as Qwikster. It’s good to see a management team with the balls to admit when they’ve done something dumb, and back-pedal.
Adam dug up two interesting pieces on evaluating the effectiveness of a design for conversion and questions you should be asking yourself whilst designing: This from 37 Signals, and this from Cennydd Bowles.
Andrew pointed out that we’re noticing a significant rise in the number of requests for iphone apps from clients here at Storm. As such he was interested in this article that goes into detail about the common unknown user functions available in devices such as the iphone and ipad. Always good to step back for a moment and remember that not everybody using the device you’re designing for is as au fait as you are with it…
For me the bookmark of the week goes to this totally ridiculous demo video of some new (and without any doubt at all – entirely black magic) technology called Patch Match. If you thought Photoshop’s “Content Aware Fill” was cool, just check this out…
