1. New Site Admin bar – a new admin bar has been added to the logged in live view, enabling quick editing of posts / pages
2. Post formats – now able to tag post format and subsequently display individual post formats eg. gallery post, aside, features
3. Multi-taxonimy queries – essentially an improved searching mechanism, more power to developers
4. Network Admin User – superseeds multi-site WordPress “Super Admin” user
5. In-site post linking – adds the facility to search and add links for internal blog posts / pages – big UI win!

This update certainly moves WordPress on from a simple blogging engine to a fully fledged CMS. Go download the latest update NOW! In honour of the release here’s Django at his best:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andy’s post is a philosophy on how to make “good” apps. It’s a great post on the principle of having 80% practicality, 10% glamour and 10% character. Ideologically, this will provide you with an app that people will love and make you a multi-millionaire! However, it doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve seen it many times on Dragon’s Den where a young, hopeful entrepreneur presents their idea, only for the dragons to rip them apart and leave them empty-handed with their dreams in tatters……So who says it’s “good” – my argument is stress the importance of user-centred design.

Who holds the purse strings? Your wife, your boss, the queen? I work in part of a team that develop large scale websites for government organisations as well as advertisers with large budgets hoping to attract millions. The app / pitch can sometimes appear to be king. It’s what wins the client over and wins us contracts. However, that doesn’t always define your app as “good”,  just because the CEO of the company loves your app doesn’t mean Joe Bloggs who subscribes monthly and uses your app day-in day-out will too. If Joe Bloggs and countless others like him, hate your app and it flops……is your app still “good”.

Andy’s model sits perfectly in terms of assessing the values of the user. Ultimately, an app needs to work – 80% practicality. Too often products are thrown by the way side for not solving a problem or doing the job it was meant to do. This is particularly emphasised in our consumer culture today. The user’s value may indeed fluctuate between glamour/character and practicality as good marketing is always effective in blurring a user’s sense of need.

For an app to succeed, the user’s voice is priceless. An app will either thrive or dive by the user’s voice. This can be seen in Apple’s App Store. Angry Birds is currently no. 1 paid for app. This follows Andy’s model of 80% practicality – it’s essentially a great game. It’s engaging, not to difficult, but challenging enough to leave you wanting more. 10% glamour – it looks good, but more importantly it doesn’t distract from the game. The graphics don’t slow the game or make things difficult to see. 10% character – the birds are fun. There are talks of a TV series based on the strength of the characters in the game.

The user ratings and reviews for Angry Birds has propelled the app to the top of the store where it has sat for a good number of months. When making a transaction decision, advocacy is key. A recommendation from a friend, a high rating or positive feedback can carry a lot of weight for a user in whether to take the plunge with your app. Andy’s model is the foundation for creating a “good” app but ultimately the end user will decide whether the app is indeed good.

Hopefully, you’ll see the importance of valuing the user in every stage of the development of an app. User-centred design starts and ends at the user. It continually comes back to the issue of “who is this for?”, “what problem are we solving” etc. it uses usability testing to measure how we’re doing in the process, whether we’re still on track or veered way off course. It isn’t a launch and cross fingers….

Team Rubber scrubs up pretty well, although wearing suits in summer is hot!

Well fear not – below is an infographic of many movies including Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Terminator, Planet of the Apes, Time Bandits plus many more!

Yesterday, I attended the Open Mobile Innovation Camp at the innovation centre in Bath. The event was hosted by Chris Book and had talks from Giles Turnball (Freelance Journalist), Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke (both from Opera). The focus of the day revolved around the current trends in mobile app development and the tensions between Native, Web and Widget apps.

The day kicked off with tech writer Giles Turnball talking about how technology has turned the press industry upside down. He recounted tales from the 90s of infra-red modems, Palm Pilots and GoType keyboards, and being one of the first journalists to actively embrace remote reporting and email. Although initially laughed at, remote journalism is now standard and Giles encouraged us not to neglect advancing technologies, but to learn about them and look to integrate them into our businesses and working lives.

Next up was Richard Spence who ‘controversially’ spoke about non-iPhone development. He reminded us that only 8% of the mobile market is iPhone whereas 71% is browser based. Richard didn’t slag of the iPhone, on the contrary, he “thanked Apple from the bottom of his heart” and agreed with Stephen Fry’s eloquent observation:

Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

Richard went on to give a brief history of mobile development platforms and where they are at now. J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian were all covered and commended for their recent improvements in the light of the ‘iPhone effect‘.

The final talk of the morning was from Bruce Lawson from Opera. Bruce was in jovial mood and was quick to evangelise the latest Opera Beta which claims to be the current fastest Javascript engine. Bruce championed the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and also highlighted some of the UX and accessibility challenges that await. Bruce emphasized the importance of optimization and minimising HTTP requests. He went on to talk about future advancements in HTML5 and CSS3 and the features that the latest Opera already supports. One particular point of interest for me was the use of Media Queries to change CSS layouts dependent on screen size, without JS sniffing. Bruce finally talked about the potential of Widgets, that Opera are involved with in editing the W3C standard.

After a lunch at the local chinese and heated debate on technology, we broke into smaller groups for our barCamp sessions. The philosophy of barCamp is to create open group dialogues about an agreed topic and to work / explore collaboratively. I attended a discussion on HTML / CSS3 with the guys from Opera, and for my second session W3C Standards for Mobile Web. Both sessions were really insightful and was particularly interesting to hear peoples’ comments from the mobile industry on mobile web.

I also picked up a couple of useful tools:

Native Mobile Development Platforms for Web Developers

Appcelerator Titanium

PhoneGap

W3C Mobile Validator

http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

Perhaps most surprising, coming to the event as a pure Web Developer (with past dabblings in mobile), I certainly didn’t feel like an outsider or feel like the technology was flying over my head. In fact, I came away with an increasing awareness that, whether I like it or not, Web Development is not simply going to be solely about the Desktop. As hopes of an archaic browser death is on the horizon, another friend is also lurking. In our discussions on Mobile Web Standards, we were reminded that the largest mobile usage is not in China, the US, or Europe, but in developing countries. If the days of IE6 support is numbered, then the days of mobile WAP support may be coming back from the dead!

It’s always good to see our friends in Bristol involved in national projects and producing engaging, collaborative online content.

But we all know that subjective design opinions are not as black and white as this. Along the spectrum are a number of complex influences that affect the outcome of the answer. One way to explore the outcome of this answer, and so to influence the approach to your design, is to ask a different question: ‘How do you think?’.

In designing user experience, user behaviour must be taken into account. But what determines a user’s behaviour? Now I’m no psychologist or sociologist, but do understand the importance of understanding user behaviour to influence design decisions.

When approaching a design decision, often the common influences are made by budget, client preferences (eg. colour), technical restraints, web trends etc. A common oversight is why the work is happening in the first place – why is the end user not using the product and making the client more money? How can we encourage the user engage more? etc.

There are lots of helpful tools to explore these questions – Personas, User Testing, Mental Models, Wireframing, User Interviews, Google Analytics and site monitoring tools etc.

However, at the heart of all these tools are not ‘What do you think’ but ‘How do you think?’

I was reminded of this again when Andy showed me a map of Russia from the Cold War era, I’d never seen Russia as a country from this perspective before. I’m very familiar with the classic landscape view of the world, even Google use it:

From this perspective it’s easy to see how, during the Cold War, Russia appears to be an imposing mass, disproportionate from it’s surrounding neighbours. However, in the perspective below, it’s easier to see the surrounding threat from all sides:

Indeed, from this perspective it’s easy to see how Russia is encamped by every major continent with the exception of Australasia. From this perspective it is easier to explore decisions and expectations made, and maybe change our thinking or approach.

The challenge to us as designers, is not to get consumed with the end result to the point that we miss the very questions that start the process.We need to be looking for examples to learn how our users are thinking, what decisions they make and why?

I’ll finish with some insight from Albert Einstein:

“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.”

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I later discovered that wrapping the script in CDATA tags allowed the script to parse and validate – happy days!

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