I’m constantly amazed how smartphones and particularly my iPhone can change the way we do things. There seems to be an app for everything. As a web developer, I’m thinking how then does the apps from App Store enable superior user experience compared to a mobile website in, say, Mobile Safari?

I decided to make a quick comparison between the Vancouver 2010 olympic official app, and the mobile website of the olympics. The app makes better use of the user location, asking for access to location data, and updating the schedule to user’s timezone for instance. In theory user location sniffing could be done on the mobile web site too, but this would obviously be less accurate. But I think it would get the timezone right. The schedule is just a joy to use in the app, making it easy to star your favorite events and keep track of your olympics timetable. There’s also additional content describing the event details and venue information in the app. I wonder why this is missing from the mobile site, as it could easily be added there too.

The app relies for much of it’s content coming straight from the mobile website, like live results, and latest news headlines. Some of the integration from website to app is not done very smoothly: You could use a back button to go back from a news article to headlines list. This is a feature that comes by default in the browser, and is easy to miss when converting content from web to an app. Live results page layout also seem to be a bit too big for iPhone screen, making the text very small and difficult to read.

Basic iPhone features, like the map, are very well integrated into the app. The mobile site and the app however lack the more bandwidth intensive content, like photos and videos. It’s something I’m actually missing, because I have a good carrier and a data plan The inclusion of quicktime video clips would definitely tilt the experience to the app’s favor, because video playing integration is so well done on the iPhone. This is something that I truly value in other well done iPhone apps, offering a quick and easy access to multimedia content.

The app also offers more quick user experience via the iPhone cache mechanisms. This is something that could be done on the mobile site too, by utilizing HTML5 browser cache in Mobile Safari. In fact, I did not find any real advantage to the app versus creating the same user experience in Mobile Safari.

Hello world! Apparently I managed to configure my email system and
Wordpress to enable posting via email… Sweet!

There has been news about Finnish startup Fruugo having to lay off significant portion of their work force because of financial problems. Fruugo is a high profile startup (at least in the Finland startup scene) that has some of the biggest names of Finland tech industry on its board, like Risto Siilasmaa and Jorma Ollila. The figures are also big for a web startup, it is rumored they’ve burned through €40 million so far. Basically I think they’ve hoped to strike it big in the e-commerce, but tens of millions for a web site that already has competitors like Amazon (they also allow e-commerce sellers to list their products on their site) sounds like a huge gamble. Frankly, the site looks quite plain, and does not have the features to draw users to do their product research and shopping on it.

Arcticstartup blog also covered Fruugo situation in their post. Jugding from the comments, many people see lack of advertising as a problem, because outside of tech news, Fruugo hasn’t really made itself visible atleast in Finland. They don’t have the user base to bring in nearly enough cash flow. How to lure customers is a complicated business, and I can’t really say what they should’ve done to succeed in it.

My gut reaction however is that trying something of this magnitude, when the competition is already well established in Europe and elsewhere, is very risky, almost suicidal. Their approach to being a general store for everything sold on web sounds like a huge undertaking, and I propably would’ve done it on smaller scale first: Build a more concentrated site with one or two product categories, see if you can make it appealing enough for sellers to have their product listed on the site and for buyers to use it to find what they’re looking for. Perhaps also strike a deal with some site with product reviews, so you have more content and can genuinely help people with their decisions.

I have a feeling, that building it big and getting it right on the first time just doesn’t work in web applications. The factors that contribute to one’s success are numerous and sometimes it’s just pure luck. Build something, see if it sticks and iterate from there sounds more like a business plan, where risks can be reduced to more manageable level.

Techcrunch has an excellent video about Mint CEO Aaron Patzer giving a presentation about starting a new web business. Mint is a web based financial management service available in the United States. The company was recently sold for $170 million! I found it highly interesting, especially the parts, where he gives practical dollar figures to give you an idea of web startup costs. There’s also slides of the speech available in the same page.

Check out this helpful comparison table of PHP IDEs. The comparison includes:

• Eclipse PDT 1/2
• Zend Studio 6
• Netbeans 6.5
• Aptana PHP
• Aptana Studio Pro
• Codelobster PHP Edition
• Nusphere PhpED 5.6

I have been using Eclipse for a while now, but several new IDEs are maturing to offer Eclipse a serious competition. There has been a shortage of good development environments for Web Developers, but the field seems to maturing now.

Ampparit.com is a free news portal from Joensuu, Eastern Finland. Ampparit provides a quick glance to most popular news services in Finland and updates with links to fresh titles real time. The idea resembles quite much Google News, but obviously is more useful to Finnish users with their better following of local news sources. Ampparit does quite accurately recognize the category the article belongs to, making it easy to follow a particular area of interest.

Ampparit also has more content to support the portal, like weather and tv data. New feature is also links to Web-TV content. The site’s UI look’s lean and functional.

Site’s portal idea is well executed, and user spends quite a lot time in the site, occasionally clicking a link and then coming back. I guess it provides great value to advertisers. There’s also a pro version to provide coverage of specific subject. All in all it’s a great site for news addicts!

Michael Osinski is a guy who wrote software that turned mortgages into bonds, or more precicely Collaterized Mortgage Obligation (CMO). His tale is an interesting reading for anyone working in software industry, and reveals the part the computers played in the formation of the current Credit Crisis.

So, how does that guy feel now? Guilty? Ashamed? Depressed for the damage done? Actually a little bit of those, but he is also quite proud of his work, and says his creation was a beautiful piece of software engineering. I think that’s also similar to how Albert Einstein felt when he realized his famous formula E=mc² would eventually lead to creation of atom bomb.

Facebook is built upon open source software like PHP, MySQL and Memcache. There’s an interesting presentation about the Facebook technology at InfoQ. Facebook also has released all kinds of software they are using themselves as an open source. Finally, their engineering blog provides interesting insights into building one of the highest trafficked sites in the Internet.

I discovered in December, that my Gmail accounts (two of them) had been hacked. All mails sent to those accounts were actually forwarded to another (the hacker’s) email account. I only realized this after a few weeks or so, because emails in those accounts are normally redirected to my another email.

As always, there’s something to be learned here. I suspect the accounts got hacked, because I was logged in on those accounts in a browser tab, while browsing other web sites in another tab. This led them vulnerable to XSS, or Cross Site Scripting. Some malicious web site had a script, that automatically upon my entering tried to post form data to the Gmail account settings page, and make the necessary changes. There’s documented attacks on the large, so this is a serious problem.

I suspect Gmail and every other web based email is always going to be vulnerable to them no matter what they do. New vulnerabilities and exploits on them are constantly discovered. When they are patched, new ones appear later. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. That’s something to think about for everyone, who (like me) use Gmail for work and have sensitive information on them.

How to limit your exposure then? One solution is to logout immediately after you finished reading your emails and continue to browse other web sites. This is not always feasible, and sometimes you just forget it.

I came up with another solution for this problem. Dedicate a browser for email access only. In case of Gmail, you can take for example Chrome browser and use it to only access Gmail/Hotmail/your-email-of-choice, thereby substantially limiting your exposure to XSS attacks. Use something else, like Firefox, for day to day browsing.

Bill Higgins, Jeff Atwood and many others are discussing about a psychological effect, that affects web application user interface design. Basically they are stating, that making UI in a web app look like a desktop app is a bad idea.

If you’re considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design. When you build a “desktop in the web browser”-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption.

This makes sense to me, when you think about it. Web applications can and should look personal, in order to allow us to create positive images about it. Desktop applications look clinical, and more or less the same, because they’re just tools. Web sites can be a lot more.

Perhaps this phenomenon is also the reason people stand for utterly horrid UI designs in some of the most popular websites in the internet. UI design does not matter in some cases, because people are willing to cut it some slack.