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With such a mammoth audience, Facebook are probably one of the few to be able to shake Google’s dominance in the online advertising market and some of their recent changes are focused on tackling Google Head-On. From an advertisers perspective, with potentially greater or more obvious targeting potential in some scenarios on Facebook combined with significant if not completely comparable audience size, it’s conceivable that some ad spend may be drawn away from Google and moved to Facebook.

Google seem to be all about continual iteration and roll-out of small new features these days. Whether it’s visual tweaks to make the search box more obvious on their homepage, helping computers understand language or adding subtle intelligent enhancements to the search results. In the latter case, searching for “empire state height” would have highlighted “…the height of the Empire State building is…” whereas for relevant information types it will now highlight “…the Empire State building is 1250ft (381m)  to the top…”.

I guess when your core website is the most used site in the world and revolves around two pages [or increadingly one page due to the initial search box being built into browser interfaces... it took me weeks to notice the visual effects on the Google homepage] you’ve got a lot of scope to continually iterate and refine the experience.

I have to confess, until I read this article I knew literally nothing about CSS transitions. I hadn’t even considered they were possible, despite becoming fairly used to using other CSS3 features and to enhance pages for browsers that support them [drop shadows, text shadows, rounded corners, etc]. Apparently part of the delay regarding CSS3 transitions being implemented was a debate regarding whether transitions are ’style’ [and therefore part of CSS] or ‘interaction’ [and therefore part of scripting].  To my mind, they are certainly just style additions - mainly just enhancing a hover state or reveal that remains functional regardless of the effect/style used. The examples provided demonstrate quite appealing enhancements such as soft reveals of a drop menu or subtle glows on hover states, though the demo moving an object [a spaceman] from point A to point B seems to stretch the “this is just a style” approach and feels less obviously applicable to most web pages. So, using a compatible browser such as Safari or Chrome, check out the CSS Transitions 101 article at Webdesigner Depot. In fact, it’s worth comparing the article in a non-supporting browser too, just to remind yourself of the experience without the transitions.

Having been a very happy Google Android user for some time, when I recently decided I could no longer get away with being a mobile professional who hasn’t used an iPhone as their main device I was surprisingly unexcited about the switch. Furthermore, I’ve had an iPod Touch for ages so it’s not even as though the iPhone held much mystery. Still, it could be ignored no longer (not now it’s on Orange at least) so I thought the least I could do is report back my findings as someone who’s genuinely invested a lot of time and a bit of love in the Android platform. So, with no particular comparison approach in mind, here’s some thoughts…

• iPhone SMS client. Just how bad is this fundamental communication element of the phone. It looks awful and is highly restrictive in that SMS is so often a trigger to other activity such as a call, calendar event, etc. Criminally bad in my opinion and utterly un-apple-esque.
• Similarly, how long will Apple persist without better use of context actions. Android is fantastic at this… Just hold down over a picture, SMS, contact, etc and up pops a menu of all the stuff you wanted to do. Very occasionally this is implemented on iphone and when it is I find it works well (off the top of my head, I think it’s used when you save a safari bookmark).
• I miss the trackball on Android. Repositioning the cursor to edit text is more cumbersome with iPhone’s zoom method, particularly if you just want to go back a few characters.
• iPhone’s screen is glorious (the screen on my new MacBook Pro is equally superior over all PC laptops). Oh, and the sound quality. Oh, and the performance. Oh, and the fact that everything just works. Pretty much flawlessly.
• iPhone’s soft keyboard easily beats Android’s. The Android has a very good hybrid mini-qwerty keypad mode, but that seems a bit like a shortfall of the full size qwerty. (Note: the hard qwerty keypad devices on android are excellent).
• Android’s google-centric always updated sync. is just brilliant if you’re Google-centric (e.g. a Google Apps user). With a little hackery, I’ve managed to get the iPhone to sync with Google Apps just the same but it wasn’t as easy out of the box.
• The iPhone copy n paste is way, way better.
• Most critically for commercial success and end-user desirability, the iTunes and App store ecosystem is the stuff android can only dream of. In fact, no other hardware/software package on any platform can match it.
• The iPhone is pretty heavy. But after a while you forget, and put it down to just being top-end build quality.
• iPhone battery is better, despite what people say.
• It feels initially as though the android is quicker to navigate around - especially regarding multiple tasking and app switching. However, once you’re into the iPhone’s “everything starts on the honescreen” method it gets pretty quick.
• Even with unlimited desktops, the iPhone is much less structured. This can be confusing when you get to having a lot of apps. And you will do.

Overall, the iPhone has become a clear winner during the 6 weeks I’ve written this. The alround user experience is almost perfection (except the SMS App, and even that I’m beginning to forget about). The Android is a very competent platform, and I expect it will go on to great and more varied things than the iPhone. However, the iPhone, as with many Apple experiences, is like a lesson in how to do things right. The icing on the cake is finding the many little gems of interface intelligence and design that they don’t even bother to tell you about - they just let you discover. iPhone users will know what I mean, and if you don’t then check back here and I’ll collate some soon.

(just to be clear, I’m comparing an HTC Hero to a 32gb iPhone 3GS. Oh, and I wrote this post using the Wordpress 2 App over a couple of days sat on various trains).

Er, yeah. I didn’t know what FCrDNS was either… Forward Confirmed Reverse DNS. [And if you don't know what DNS is then you might want to go read something else because this will bore you rigid]. In a nutshell…

• DNS: Maps a domain name to an IP address e.g. commonagency.com -> 94.136.61.118
  This is fundamental to every day use of the web in that it ensures when someone enters a domain name they get routed to the server from which that domain is served.
• Reverse DNS: Maps an IP address to a domain name e.g. 94.136.61.118 -> commonagency.com
  This is frequently used by email servers to validate that emails received from another email server IP address can be matched with a domain name that appears to correlate with the sender’s address [that's actually not exactly true but it's a simplistic explanation].
• FCrDNS: RDNS lookup followed by a DNS lookup e.g. 94.136.61.118 -> commonagency.com -> 94.136.61.118
  This is apparently the best approach and is now used by many email servers.

Why care? Well hopefully you won’t ever need to, but when a client calls to say that they can’t get emails through to one of their customers, these are the kind of things you learn. Usually you’ll have set-up your DNS/RDNS in such a way that FCrDNS works by default, and if not you can usually do it quite quickly. There’s a great tool at http://ipadmin.junkemailfilter.com/rdns.php which helps with testing. Basically, if you know that your RDNS is set-up correctly and that you’ve got some appropriate SPF records set-up too but you’re still finding some emails get blocked, check out your FCrDNS. And if nothing else, it’s another acronym that you didn’t know you didn’t know, but now do.

Hopefully no major surprises to web designers and developers in this 10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit, except that one which I think is often ignored these days is maintaining a visual indicator for links that have already been visited. Often, from a visual perspective, having unvisited and visited text links appear in two different colours can look slightly untidy but it’s a valid point that the usability issue of not recognising that you’ve visited a link previously has a potentially greater negative impact on the user experience than the different colours.

Very interesting US start-up Square seems to be developing a service to let anyone accept payment by card using a mobile phone. I love the visible verification system for checking the card holder is really who they claim to be (identical twin fraud anyone?).

There’s so much noise at the moment about which circumstances social networks should be considered a relevant customer communication channel that it’s nice to come across really successful executions as examples. The IKEA Facebook campaign to promote their new Malmo store is one such example, developed by Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors. By encouraging user’s to share pictures from the profile page of the Malmo IKEA Store Manager, user’s are effectively personally endorsing the IKEA products to their network of friends.

With general opinion being that Apple [iPhone] has the mobile market wrapped up and that Google [Android] might, if they’re lucky, come in a distant second, it was with some interest that I attended the Nokia Ovi event on Tuesday night in Leeds. It’s widely recognised that Nokia are on the back foot at the moment, slipping [rapidly?] both in terms of market share and consumer appeal. However, from a developer perspective, four positive things things struck me about Ovi by Nokia:

1. Due to leveraging the web and Flash technologies that Nokia have been trying hard to integrate into all their handsets for some time, Ovi offers a speed of development for ‘low level’ apps that isn’t currently as easy on iPhone/Android. Whilst both those platforms also offer ‘packaged web applications’ as an alternative to full software development, neither is yet as feature rich as the Ovi options.
2. Ovi is available on Nokia Series 40 as well as Series 60 phones. What this means is that Nokia Ovi enables developers to reach the mass middle market phones rather than just the high-end smartphones. Naturally, this position will change quite rapidly, with cut-down iPhone/Android devices always being rumoured and with ‘mid-range’ users rapidly migrating upgrading to ‘high-end’ year on year anyway.
3. Nokia were keen to stress that they really really want to help us [to help them]. It would be too bold to suggest they were ‘desperate’ to help, but there did seem a genuine acknowledgement that to make Ovi anywhere near as successful as the Apple App Store, Nokia would have to leverage their massive existing developer community by making themselves genuinely available, so that things get moving before it’s too late.
4. And lastly, I was inspired to feel that they are still, after all, Nokia. It seems crazy to hear so frequently how Nokia are “down and out”, despite being a company that have understood and dominated mobile for so long. They certainly do have a battle on their hands, but being in the same space as the handful of guys representing Ovi certainly demonstrated that their absolute core business is mobile. Whether that’s enough, only time will tell.

Anyway, we’ll let you know how we get on but you can expect us to be visible on Ovi some time in the near future.

At the FOWD tour event in Leeds earlier this year, Brendan Dawes gave a great talk on the importance and role of beauty in everyday life and how this should be applied in interface design and digital systems. The Small Worlds Flash game is definitely an example of this. I’m not a gamer [not by modern standards, though I'm still weak to temptation when it comes to any release of FIFA on XBox 360], but there is something magical about the Small Worlds game that just draws you in. Despite winning a recent gaming award, I guess Small Worlds won’t be challenging CoD7, WoW9 or DGACAG5 in the annual gaming honours, but it’s a fine way to waste 10 minutes online, and might just remind you that small can certainly be beautiful.