User Experience Design Blog

Death of Mobile Apps

Michael Mace, former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, writes about the death of mobile applications on his blog. The post contends that given the barriers to platform access put in place by mobile carriers–”shrinking distribution channels”–and the lack of alignment between mobile platforms and vertical markets, the mobile app will succumb to the mobile web app. Web apps geared towards mobile devices are not subject to the same distribution and development cost problems. Mace responds to commentary to say that his argument does not consider enterprise mobile applications, or the actions of large companies contracting mobile application developers in their own efforts at a sweet slice of the mobile market.

Codename Ginger - Netvibes Update

Ryan Paul at ars technica reviews the new Netvibes update, codenamed Ginger. Primarily an RSS reader, the start page has a new user interface with a unified content panel, drag-and-drop feeds and widgets, a private activity list that shows what you’ve added and deleted, a contacts panel which can help users find friends on Netvibes, and a micro-blogging status feature. This last comes as a surprise, since Netvibes already supports various AJAX widgets for Twitter, Jaiku, and other services. But, Paul concludes, “In its role as an integrator of social web services, Netvibes always pursued proactive solutions to fragmentation problems. Perhaps now as a provider of social web services, Netvibes will look to expand its bridge-building activities.”

iPhone U

AppleInsider reports that Apple is trying to reestablish itself in the educational sector. For the past six months, five schools–Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale and a small school in Texas named Abilene Christian University–have been testing pilot programs with Apple that enable iPhones and iPod Touches to download class presentations directly to their handsets over WiFi rather than through a host computer. The smallest of the five schools, ACU, just announced last week that all its incoming freshman this fall will receive an iPhone or iPod touch as part of “a new learning experience called ‘Connected.’”

Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts Tuesday at lunchtime.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 1:02 pm and is filed under All User Experience Design, Current Events.