Taken from AdMob data:
First up we have smartphone ad request from just the United States. Android started at 1% and steadily rose to 17%. This was due large in part to two Android phones: the HTC Dream and HTC Magic
That’s some significant growth for Android on the mobile web. With a lot of new phones on the horizon for the holiday season, Android is looking like an unstoppable juggernaut.
The demo is hard to see because of screen glare, but our UX designer Madhava goes into some detail about the design decisions that went into making Firefox for a mobile phone. One of our big challenges is how to optimize the use of screen space:
For the small screen problem, one of the things we do is when you start to use a page, the controls you don’t need anymore pan off the top of the screen…just by using the page, UI you don’t need goes away.
Uniquely, mobile Firefox takes this one further step by spatially relating browser controls with the page, similar to the URL bar at the top of the page. Controls can be found off the left or right of web content with a quick flick.
DF is one of my favorite feeds. One nice touch on DF: when a post is about another website, clicking on the title takes the reader to the external content, keeping the permalink as a secondary action. The permalink is demoted to a simple iconic representation of his blog (★), so the reader gets a subtle hint about which link takes her to DF. I’ve ripped off the concept completely with a little WordPress wizardry (this should go over well). Frankly the idea shouldn’t just be a DF thing, it should be a blogging pattern. Thanks for the inspiration Mr. Gruber.
Update: This behavior is now broken after a botched WordPress update, so I’ve reverted to default behavior. The DF behavior on aggregators was suboptimal anyways: the entry would say “Benjamin Stover’s Blog” but the link of course would go to the article I point to, with no summary. Applicable usability rule: expectations tend to override other considerations.
I have enlisted in the blogging masses. Sold out to yesterday’s trend (I hear microblogging is the new black). I don’t want to make a big deal, but I’d like to set the tone by telling you why, just now in 2009, I suddenly have delved into the medium. I once had a role model of mine tell me, “If you can’t stop thinking about it, if you can’t shut up about it, then blog about it.” I’ll take that advice at face value.
Here’s the thing: I’m a little scared, at the least nervous. I’ll make mistakes, or rant in a fruitless direction, or change my mind about something I said. I hate to have evidence of my shortcomings out there on the intardwebs. But! Everything gets better through iteration, so I present to you iteration 0 of my bloggy projection on the web. It’s not perfect, but it works.