If you bought a piece of crap that actually hurts your brand, then you just have a piece of crap app to appease your executives, who should be asking you why you sunk cash into it. “Make an app for the sake of having an app” is not a good goal.

Do you have people at your company with a keen eye for quality and enough business sense to steer you clear of third parties looking to sell you a piece of crap? You may have one internally with an internal web design team and are not utilizing them. If not, hire a firm with good mobile user experience design strategy skills and experience, not just some firm reaching for new business from you and throwing an app together.

Make sure your IT team, marketing or outside vendors have your business’s best interest at heart and have a good strategy for this expense. Is your website design, content and performance optimized for a phone’s size and utilizing the features of these newer web browsers? Slightly more Americans (36.4%) use their mobile browser than access applications (34.4%) – source via Luke Wroblewski. You should be focusing on that too.

A mobile-optimized site works for both major mobile browsers and is probably less expensive, since it uses the same kind of code for both Android and iPhone browsers. Apps require different builds and likely cost more to release. You only need a native app if you need to know more about the user, other than location, and need access hardware, like the phone’s camera, or data on the app, like an address book or calendar app.

My opinion is probably not popular, because it challenges some lazy IT management (you know you’re out there) to relinquish some control to a user experience design professional and take a little longer to do the best job possible. It may even do the opposite and discourages someone’s costly pet project at a corporation or from an unscrupulous consultant.

If you find that you do have a need for an app and did a proper cost-benefit analysis, but want to go cheap and skip the user experience design steps, you’ll get a maintenance problem instead of a solution, an IT or business manager with terrible vision whose decision making is having a negative impact that they don’t even recognize, and you get a scar on your brand integrity, all to save the cost of proper design and strategy.

Good luck to you.

And yes, I’m aware this site isn’t entirely mobile-optimized. I’m actively working on it.

Great personal experience story from Eric Schmidt about Steve Jobs. The common burn on Jobs is that he was “just the business guy” and didn’t make or build anything he’s attributed credit for. Arguing the value of programming languages isn’t something even many tech executives could do.

I’ve been in design and code reviews where I influenced someone else’s work based on my experience and expertise, directing them away from what would lead to problems technically and aesthetically. I’ve also worked with developers who had trouble articulating their value to executives. I can’t write programming languages, but I can assess the value of software performance and presentation quality equally and prioritize accordingly. It wins respect among the technically adept developers who saw beyond just making things work and were happy to have someone who wanted to help them in being ultimately successful and take on the responsibility to make sure their work was usable and appealing.

The deifying of Jobs is equally distrubing. He was just a guy and was far from magical. He didn’t foresee the future. He ruthlessly directed his company to push towards the new and not fear deprioritizing the old, as evidenced by this week’s announcements showing no change to the iPods other than price, color and digital watch faces for the nano. It’s not a growth market and iPhone is.

He was a smart guy who greatly cared about what he did for a living, probably more than most. Who doesn’t wish their day job was so fulfilling? Who doesn’t wish their manager cared about their work as much as their managed employees?

I’ve always greatly respected people who loved what they do so much, they do it to their last day they’re physically able to. Jobs and his Apple products were far from perfect, but it’ll be hard to find someone with a better batting average.

http://www.reelz.com/movie-news/11794/steven-spielberg-promises-not-to-alter-e-t-or-raiders-of-the-lost-ark-for-blu-ray-release/

Does George Lucas have a good editor inside himself anymore?

As John Gruber points out, the location of switching views would be better served as tappable tabs at the bottom.

Who the hell puts “Cancel” first in a vertical UI? “Cancel” is not the first act I should be thinking about. If you’re gonna make an iOS app, embrace it and regardless of platform, use good UI logic and usability patterns. It’s not like Google doesn’t have the money to fund quality work.

They could really punch Facebook in the mouth with a good, dedicated iPad app first. In fact, they SHOULD have. Facebook’s been dragging their feet there. Hell, Skype beat them both to it! Google didn’t even bother to make an iPod touch app? What’s the distinction between iPhone and iPod touch users to justify that? Weird.

UPDATE:

Why Adobe Edge Says Nothing About Flash’s Future
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/231300020

I think “nothing” is a declarative statement that’s flawed. The title should be “Why Adobe Edge Says Nothing About Flash’s Immediate Future” to be more accurate and flexible to unpredictable developments. JavaScript has replaced a number of things people relied on Flash for, because JavaScript engines are a part of browsers that each browser development team has control of. Flash Player can’t be improved on by browser teams. It’s performance rests with Adobe, which has been variable.

CSS3 has animation features, but would I use it beyond animation needs with just a few key frames (like a web widget discoverable transition action) or for experimental work? Not really.

I’d likely use a JavaScript library widget or, for long-form animation, I’d still use Flash or render a video of the animation. If I had web video I wanted people to see, would I just publish it in Flash today? Only if I didn’t care that the growing mobile web audience won’t view it nicely. It’s pretty foolish to limit a growing audience. Maybe I want to prevent anyone from downloading it easily.

The biggest benefits this article mentions about Flash are the familiarity with tools (something that can change rapidly) and that it has digital rights management that web standards methods (HTML5 video tag) don’t. Flash isn’t foolproof though. I’ve seen Flash video capture tools out there. No encoding or tool is a panacea to the reproduction of digital content. Hollywood, the record companies and book publishers can’t sleep easily if their business model is based on DRM. It makes things harder for casual users, but they’ll never stop the motivated.