It’s anyone’s guess whether Apple and Google will be interested in playing along. Should Mozilla flesh out these API standards, however, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t. To this point, both companies have been eager to advance the state of the web; Google naturally benefiting from increased web usage and historically pushing boundaries with Chrome, Apple understanding the critical role the web plays in its customers lives and consequently incubating webkit / Safari.

The web is a powerful thing, and Mozilla’s interests are 100% aligned with promoting an open, unencumbered web available from all devices. That’s a position we’re happy to support.

1. It’s not possible to replicate native performance now because of the nature of scripted languages, but there will come a point soon where for all but the most intensive applications the difference is negligible.

People who want to build a great application with a certain set of features in mind can get better results with native technologies right now than they can with web technologies.

Fantastic, cogent summary of the factors in play. Do read.

The link that spurred this miniature post: The Mobile Context from Mark Kirby.

Design Decisions: Basecamp Mobile UI

One of the first challenges was simply how to take the Basecamp design and make it work on a much smaller screen. It needed to look like Basecamp and be familiar to people who have been using the desktop version for years. We wanted it to perform like a native app but we didn’t want it to look like one, it was far more important that it looked like Basecamp.

Providing Great User Experience with Feedback

Feedback is an essential part of software user interface design. It’s especially true when designing applications for current mobile devices. Tapping a touch screen is less precise than clicking with a mouse. Touch screens also lack the tactile and auditory feedback of a physical key or button. Slow, unreliable cellular data access adds to the confusion. A user might wonder: Is the app broken or do I have a poor connection? Was my tap registered or did my fingers miss that tiny button? Making sure users get clear feedback in response to their actions and to changes in state or conditions is key to a great software experience.

Hmm. You do have an iPad, don’t you? Have you ever noticed the eerie similarities? Glass surface, brilliant backlight. In the spirit of the-best-tool-is-the-one-you-have-at-hand, we’ve co-opted the iPad into a portable tracing table and tossed in a few extra features for good measure. Adjustable grids, circles, angles, and even a French curve.

Say hello to Full Stop’s first iOS application: Traceable. Get it now in the App Store ($1.99) or head over to the official product page.

Bookmarklets basically perform those two steps: gather data and display data. It was pretty simple to insert a step to save the data to Jdrop. Once the data is in the cloud, it can be accessed from anywhere especially desktops with more screen real estate. The bookmarklet’s display code is easily re-used by wrapping the data in JSON and passing it back to the display code inside Jdrop’s web page. That, in a nutshell, is Jdrop.

Blaze Mobile Performance Test uses real iPhone and Android agents to conduct a performance analysis of browsing your website on a mobile device.

In the single test I ran (United Pixelworkers), the page didn’t appear to load at all and the numbers seem a bit funny. Once they work out the bugs, this will be a useful tool for mobile development.

(Via Steve Souders.)