• Designing for the iPhone: Put Your Content in My Pocket
  Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave with Osama bin Laden, you know that Apple is selling an iPhone and that it’s a hit.
  (tags: iphone css tutorial mobile)
• Web Design Inspiration for the iPhone
  A great gallery of iPhone specific webdesigns.
  (tags: iPhone css inspiration)

Alright… so unless you you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple years, you know that TDD, Source Control and Build Automation have fully hit the Flash design and development scene. It seems as though everyone is talking about it. A lot. And then commenting on it. A lot. (more…)

• A UI Design and Prototyping Treasure Chest | Web Design Ledger
  Holy crap on a cracker. You've never even seen so many useful GUI and Wireframing tools. Really, I bet you haven't
  (tags: wireframe ux ui free prototyping templates)
• Minimal Web Icons
  With so many free icon sets available now, sometimes it makes more sense to not spend countless hours designing and creating your own. However, it’s important that you do find the right style of icons to match your design. In the case of minimal web design, it’s all about clean layouts, little use of color, and few design elements.
  (tags: icons minimalism)
• Realism in UI Design
  From the article:

  "Graphical user interfaces are full of symbols. Symbols need to be reduced to their essence. This helps avoid cluttering the user interface with meaningless distractions, and makes it easier for people to «read» the symbol and figure out the meaning of an interface element. Realistic details can get in the way of what you’re trying to communicate to your users."

  (tags: icon UI UX realism usability)

It’ll be here soon. It’ll be widget making time. Woo hoo.

Come to me, baby.

• UITest.com – Validators, Checkers, Generators, and Tools for Web Design …
  A good suite of web checkers… nice collection to help you out.
  (tags: ui test checker generator testing validator)

Everyone makes resolutions for the New Year, right? Quit smoking, eat better, be nicer, be more productive, etc etc. How about resolutions for your web presence and activity? What things should be considering doing, or STOP doing online to maximize 2010? After all, it is the year we make contact, so when the monolith comes calling, you want to be ready! Here’s what I am planning on working on:

• Understanding Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin Technical integration points better and using them! – Yes, all these sites can speak to each other. But should they? And should they always be talking to each other? Probably not always. I need to explore a more friends and family friendly approach to sharing my statuses via Twitter and Facebook. I frequently leave my non-geek friends scratching their heads. Hmm.
• Building out some more web-service based mashups – In 2008 I built a lot of mashups. Some for clients, most for fun. In 2009 at Iona, we’ve built a few site features out for clients leveraging various web services, but by and large it was pretty quiet for me personally on this front. I need to get back into it!
• Reskinning my blog – I’m coming on year 3 of this design. Time for something new.
• Refining my following list on Twitter and building some more lists – I think I over followed when I joined Twitter and I’m working to rectify that. Too many auto replying bots, too many marketing feeds, on and on. Also in the second half of 2009, Twitter launched lists. I have made a couple of them so far, but as they continue to build out this feature I intend to use it.
• Using Social Media Better When at Conferences and Events – Nothing is more annoying in a Twitter feed or your Facebook newsfeed than seeing a constant bombardment of updates from someone at a conference that feels as though every utterance coming from the speaker they are watching needs to be shared to all from the mountaintops. I have done this more than once. Not happening this year. For a great list of other things you should stop Twittering about, check this out.

So what are you focusing on this year? May I make a few suggestions, if you have chosen any? Here we go.

• Build Something – For Real – Stop being a flapping head social media douche and really make something! Some videos, a real website without your stupid grinning mug on it, an app, a mashup, an experience. Sure, maybe this sounds cynical, and maybe it’s a little bit much, but I’m just so tired of seeing the same old tired routine by “strategists”. Nearly all of ‘em just parrot whatever Seth Godin, Gary V, Chris Brogan or Jason Fried say and virtually all of ‘em are actually contributing very little to the conversation or the larger landscape.
• Stop Talking About “Maxmizing Your Personal Brand’s Reach by Microblogging”
  – Or whatever other crap your inner social media kissass self thinks will get you some sucker to part with their money. At this point, major corporations have “social media policies”. Little companies either get it or they probably never will. Where does this leave you? Well, if you were a “web designer” before all of this, you probably still are now. If you were a talentless hanger-on-er before… well, you can probably guess.
• Strongly question or reconsider what your “SEO Expert” is suggesting.
  - Do they Have your web copy looking like it was written by a 3rd grader? They are doing it wrong. With properly written markup and a decent product message, you don’t need to Google bomb your way to the top of the rankings. Certainly, writing repetitive boring copy may have its advantages (it’s easy and doesn’t take much creativity) and can sometimes get you higher rankings, but at what cost… You ultimately devalue your organic search results by not giving the user and deeper content once they visit your site.
• Don’t Build a Microsite without a Media Buying Plan and determing the Metrics Package and how it’s going to be implemented. – You would not believe how often new microsites sites pop up for products and services if you are not involved in this industry. Weekly, there are dozens featured on Marketing and Advertising blogs. So often when you visit the site and poke around the source code, you notice there is not an analytics package in place. Unreal. What a waste of money. Make a pledge to your budget to not launch a site without measuring how it’s working.
• If You Don’t Have a Business Twitter or Facebook Account, You Absolutely Need One – With these sites drawing the type of traffic they do, if your business is not on them, you are really missing out. Even if you are a straight up B2B services company and do very little public marketing, you can find value in being on these sites. If nothing else, you should be there in order to at least protect your brand name in the space and prevent it being hijacked.

• Make Your Mockup in Markup
  Die Photoshop, die! A great multi-step program for getting rid of that Photoshop death spiral of mockups from your process. Very nice.
  (tags: process photoshop deathspiral tips mockup)

Ahh… that time of the year again. Time for everyone’s top ten end of the year lists. I used to write ones for record albums or movies, videos games etc. Here I am taking a slightly different slant. I haven’t ever put one together focused on the industry that I work in, the web/rich internet app design space. This is my attempt at that. These aren’t really in an order or “awesomeness” or anything… I welcome comments and your additions. Please feel free to shoot down my suppositions or add more!

• Google Releases Galore – The list was staggering. I couldn’t possibly get them all here, but some notables were Voice, Chrome, Chrome OS, new Android devices, Wave, and major revisions to the Maps and Earth APIs. A really strong list of stuff, and virtually all of it is highly useful and usable. They are definitely on a roll now. Are they making good on their promise to “not be evil”? It can’t be easy with that many outlets.
• Twitter Goes Main-Mainstream! – When Twitter’s publicized race between CNN and AK to reach a million followers hit the mainstream press, that was a wake up to virtually every media outlet out there. Twitter was for real. Now, you can’t even watch your local affiliate, pick up a small town paper or even talk to your aunt without them telling you to follow them on Twitter. Numerous high profile magazine covers on Fortune and other “old media” stalwarts have signaled a changing of the guard, if you will.
• People Finally Notice Facebook Privacy Settings – Facebook has taken some heat in the past for Beacon and various other advertising techniques they have employed to provide users with targeted content. With later 2009′s changes to the privacy settings page and a note from Zuckerberg to all users about the changes coming soon, it obvious that Facebook’s privacy policy is on a lot of people’s minds. I know I’m not too keen on my wall posts showing up in Google searches or things like that, and I have had a lot of novice FB user friends and relatives ask me how to restrict their content so that only close friends can see things. Now, will this help people finally realize the difference between a private message and a wall post!
• Oracle Buyout of Sun – “The database giant swallows the beleagured server system maker”, lots of headlines like that spun out after news of the buyout. Most, if not all missed the simple fact that Sun controls the MySQL Open Source Database. Even the Oracle press release neglects that fact. Since a large majority of notable Open Source projects use MySQL as their database, this has a large number of people in the community apprehensive and readying thei exit strategies. Will it result in a fork of the DB? Stay tuned for this one.
• Piratebay Rollercoaster – Is it up? Is it down? Are they in jail? Ever since the fateful day when their offices were stormed, the future of the tracker had been in question. They went to trial and all were found guilty, sentenced to jail for a year and a hefty fine was leveed. These convictions are all in appeals now. Then in the summer, Global Gaming Factory X AB announced they were intending to purchase the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world. The deal fell through. In November, they announced they would be shutting down the tracker portion of TPB, stating that it was unnecessary in today’s technological world of torrent distribution. While not technically a “web design topic”, it is important due to the huge amount of content trafficked via Torrents (estimated to account for up to 25% of all bits travelling the tubes.)
• Flash and Silverlight Play Feature Tag – No question about it, I’ve been tough on Silverlight. It’s too be expected, I’m a long time Mac user and a Flash developer. You couldn’t hardly expect me to jump on the bandwagon of a plug-in that directly competes with my favorite one and doesn’t offer proper development tools on the platform I spend all of my time on. This year at PDC, however, the newest version of Silverlight was unveiled, and man, does it look sweet! It finally is reaching a new feature parity of Flash. It still has no Mac dev tools, though. One thing is certain with all of this, it is really pushing Adobe to make Flash better. The 10.1 player update is bringing massive memory and performance updates and the AIR 2.0 update is bringing a ton of great improvements that will allow it to get a lot more powerful as an app development platform. I’m really happy to see the 2 way competition here, it’s good for everyone on the web.
• IE9 Announces Hardware Acceleration For The Browser – I have really mixed feelings on this. No actually, I really don’t like it much after further review. The features it will bring to websites are going to be amazing, no doubt, but with it being a Direct X implementation, there is little question that it is going to lead to a further forking of the web. Will anything programmed to take advantage of these IE9 features work on Firefox? Safari, Chrome? Older version of IE? In all likelihood, no. It’s probably not possible.
• OGG Theora Not Chosen for HTML5′s Media Format – This really put a crimp in HTML5′s ever shining hope. A single, dependable unified system agnostic video codec would be a huge thing for the W3 to get pushed through. Alas, it doesn’t seem to be. At least not right yet. Too many vendors, PC makers, software developers and everyone else are still squabbling for turf. They seem to have hit an impasse at this point, but Mozilla says they have no intention on giving in.
• Firefox Surpasses Any Single IE Version As The Most Popular Browser - Granted, Firefox has taken a beating lately by Webkit in many performance tests, but the venerable open source browser has recently overtaken IE as the world’s most widely used browser. Most impressive. From the linked article: “As of last week, Firefox 3.5 claimed 21.93% of the market, edging past IE7′s 21.2% share. That said, Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 still collectively hold over 55% of the pie.”
• With Smartphone Success, Comes a Mobile Version of Everything! – Smartphone market share keeps growing, and with it, mobile data usage. As this market continues to develop, content developers are caught in a very interesting pickle. Create a mobile version of their site for use in the handheld’s browser or build custom tailored apps that accomplish the user’s goals. Seems as though most major providers that can swing it are hedging their bets and building both. ESPN, New York Times, LinkedIn, Twitter, the list goes on and on. Will this continue? It doesn’t seem like a sustainable model to me, with development costs skyrocketing with each new device or platform coming to the markets. Luckily with a great SOA back end, building the new discreet UI for a device is only a marginal cost, relatively speaking, but there is only so far this can go.

So, there you have it. My list, what do you have on yours? I thought I did a pretty job scouring back through my feedreader and various other sources, so I feel pretty good about the list, but I really am looking for insights from others on this topic, too!

• Design View / Andy Rutledge – Dog and Pony Show Design
  FTA: "…on a mutually agreed upon date, AGENCY will present one or more (AT DESIGNER DISCRETION) 2-page visual design mockup(s) for review with CLIENT…" – Damn, that's some sexy contractual text. Makes me all weak in the knees. If you need some help finding your designer backbone and end the idea that you need to provide the magic number of 3 mockups for client reviews, this article is perfect for you!
  (tags: process productivity mockups)
• Design View / Andy Rutledge – Where Wireframes Are Concerned
  Hmmm… Seems sacriligeous, I know, but sometimes wireframes may not be the best deliverable for every project or client. Read on for an insightful explanation on this.
  (tags: wireframe process prototyping)