Which Is Mobile?

Jen Simmons asks, "Which is Mobile?" This is the link that Jen points to in that last tweet. This has been something that has frustrated me more and more recently. I keep clicking on links in Twitter from someone I follow, while on my iPhone or iPad, only to have the destination site try to reload the webpage as their mobile version of the site, which breaks the link and just sends me to their homepage. So let me get this straight: You've decided to implement a special, mobile version of your Web site that is going to supposedly make it easier for me to use on my iPhone or iPad (which can browse "full" versions of sites just fine, thank you very much), and your supposed "mobile friendly" version of your site actually makes it harder to use because it prevents me from arriving that the linked designation because that same link fidelity doesn't have parity with your non-mobile site. Lovely. Suffice it to say, I hate mobile sites. Just give me the full webpage, by default. Don't make me scroll to the bottom to hunt for your "Switch to full site" link, that is, if you even have one. I think Jen Simmons is spot on here.

Andy Rutledge Redesigns The New York Times

Andy Rutledge, in a post called "News Redux":

Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.

Clueless Commenter Of The Week

This morning I was attempting to read John Gruber's link to Daniel Bailey's article he wrote earlier this week entitled, "Apple, Is It Time To Shut Safari Down?". Apparently, due to everyone across the entire Internet pointing and laughing at Daniel over this absurd article where he almost goes a whole sentence at one point before getting a fact wrong, his article has been pulled down. It was pulled down at ConceivablyTech, The Motley Fool, Extremetech, and a few other places that syndicate his drivel. Luckily, Google still has the article cached. The article, as Gruber said on Daring Fireball, was as bad as I expected it to be. However, the comments were particularly bad. This one takes the cake though:

Justin Clements: I have never understood these "browser wars". I just want a browser that displays a web site. How hard is it to understand that? MS introduce IE8, because IE7 was bad? Firefox release 4 (or 5, i dunno) because 3 was awful? Safari 5 because 4 was so bad? I don't get it. No Justin, you do not.

The Price Of "Free"

Richard Muscat, writing at Serious Simplicity:

My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles. I think this piece hits it out of the park. Why should you price your product as a pay-for-service or good? This article lays out all of the reasons and why free should never be your decision.

Tweetmarks

Tweetmarks:

Tweetmarks is a web service for setting and getting the "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user. It can be used to "sync" the reading position between multiple Twitter clients and platforms. It was created by Riverfold Software. Also see this blog post introducing the service. All Twitter client application developers: PLEASE integrate this into your clients. As for why Twitter hasn't already implemented this themselves, Marco Arment writes: Unfortunately, I doubt that Twitter’s official Mac and iOS apps will. Twitter has decided, for whatever reason, not to do this to date. I heard a while back that this was because they want people to just read what’s there now, like a river of news, not to try to “keep up” with a potentially insurmountable timeline. They didn’t want to encourage features like this that would allow someone to know how far “behind” they are, because that could cause guilt and feelings of information overload, which could discourage usage. I believe they are wrong in this line of thinking. Moving from Tweetbot on my iPhone to Twitteriffic on my iPad to the Twitter app on my Mac feels like a broken experience. Having to re-read supposed "new" updated over again to figure out my place depending on where I am just feels wrong. Twitter is arrogant in trying to dictate how users should use their service rather than trying to accommodate the reality of how their users currently use Twitter. To quote Marco again: And as long as Twitter doesn’t have an API for it, widespread Tweetmarks support in apps is badly needed for anyone who uses multiple Twitter clients. So if you make a Twitter client, please add Tweetmarks support. Yes, please.

Motorola Admits Open Android Store Means Low Quality Apps

Nancy Gohring, IDG News:

Motorola’s CEO blamed the open Android app store for performance issues on some phones. Of all the Motorola Android devices that are returned, 70 percent come back because applications affect performance, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, said during a webcast presentation at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology conference on Thursday. Unlike most other mobile app stores, the Android Market is totally open, meaning anyone can upload an application to the store. While Google removes applications that are found to be malicious, there is no mechanism for ensuring that applications perform efficiently. “For power consumption and CPU use, those apps are not tested. We’re beginning to understand the impact that has,” Jha said. You're just now beginning? Where the heck have you been for the past 2 years?

Lodsys Responds to Apple, Files Lawsuits Against App Developers Anyway

Eric Slivka, writing at Macrumors:

Patent holding firm Lodsys today published a series of blog posts revealing that the company has filed suit against some App Store developers, accelerating its efforts to extract licensing fees from developers for using in app purchases and upgrade links in their App Store applications. Lodsys had given developers 21 days to negotiate a license before filing suit, but the firm appears to have initiated lawsuits early in order to thwart Apple's efforts to back the developers. More details, directly from the bastards themselves, at the Lodsys blog. Florian Muellre writes on FOSS Patents: For the app developers who have been sued, this is now a very critical situation. As I explained in my Lodsys FAQ, patent litigation in the United States is extremely costly. The most important thing for those app developers is to clarify with Apple — and to the extent that Android apps are involved, with Google — whether they will be held harmless and receive blanket coverage including possible damage awards.

Apple Announces WWDC 2011 Keynote

Apple:

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and a team of Apple executives will kick off the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote address on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. At the keynote, Apple will unveil its next generation software - Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X; iOS 5, the next version of Apple’s advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch; and iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering. It is certainly out of the ordinary for Apple to pre-announce exactly what the keynote will be about. As John Gruber says, it is probably due to Apple making sure there are no expectations that there will be any hardware. Gruber is usually correct on these things.