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Today, I receive an email from Cameron Moll, reminding me about the (almost, August 28th) release of his long awaited Mobile Web Design book. Perfect, I thought. I’ve been waiting for this almost as long as I was waiting for the release of the iPhone.

One of the reasons I’ve been waiting in such anticipation is that, for the last 10 months or so, two of the biggest projects I’ve been working on, directly relate to mobile web. Not so much in the sense of mobile web design, but in the sense that both of these projects make use of mobile technology to extend the web beyond web browsers. I’m very pleased to say that one of these, KaDoink, just launched into limited public beta.

This is Delivery

This was extremely exciting news. Lauren and I have been working with KaDoink for the better part of the year and we’re continuing to work with them to better define this branch of web development and design.

On May 31, 2005 CNN reported on the “not far away” Smart Homes:

The entry “home” in your mobile phone address book will have a whole new meaning in a few years — your place of residence is likely to be clever enough to send SMS messages directly to you, and you will do the same to it.
Julie Clothier for CNN

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This week one of my clients sent me an email, responding to some design comps I had sent. The gist of the email was this:

. . .these look too much like websites.

Fighting my initial impulse to pound out a reply “They are websites,” I took a minute to think about what she was saying. In the first place, she was right. They did look like websites, but that wasn’t what she was really saying. What she was saying was that the designs I sent her looked too much like any other website. They were nice, well designed, very detailed and otherwise utterly boring. When did we get to the point where everything looks like everything else? I look around on the web and it’s much worse than just a handful of design trends that are being repeated over and over. There is this sense of despair. It’s almost like web designers are feeling so uninspired, design is following the API mashup trend and we’re seeing some pretty strange looking stuff. Hey, if this looks good and this looks good, they’ll look good together…

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First and foremost, the iPhone is just really cool. Even with the extraordinary blunder Apple made by partnering with a single wireless provider (and probably the worst, at that), the iPhone is just so cool, I’m willing to make sacrifices. Not many companies put out products that can do that. This is one thing Apple has going for it.

One of the major issues with the iPhone, however, is the touch-screen interface. Don’t get me wrong, for 90% of what you can do on the iPhone, the slick, touch-screen actions of sliding and tapping work so beautifully, it’ll make you cry. The other 10% is a concern for many users. To start with, the number one set back, according to Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric, is the difficulty users found in sending text messages (SMS).

Participants uniformly found text entry SMS and email to be difficult. They were frustrated by the forced use the vertical keyboard and the lack of visibility for editing the middle of a word or sentence.
- UN, 18 July 2007

Not to mention, the keys are just too close together and small for many people to navigate accurately, since you can’t use touch to distinguish one key from another. For this reason, I am proposing the introduction of iThumb, an iPhone accessory designed specifically to achieve touch-screen accuracy for the medium to large thumbed.

iThumb accessory kit and packaging

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