On Friday night I attempted step outside of the world of digital media and information superhighways and attended the The Edwardian World’s Faire, here in San Francisco.

The Edwardian period fascinates me for the fashion and adventure our modern lives seem so miserably to lack. The outing we planned, was intended as a brief departure into this world, and to my surprise it was very nearly approaching successful. I left behind all traces of my contemporary life, barring my iPhone and six one dollar notes, all minted in the last 3 years.

My inability to part with my iPhone, for a night in the early 1900s, is excusable by my standards, but my reasons and the resulting outcome turned out to be quite contrary. There are a dozen or more reasons why I love my iPhone, but the camera was never among them. It is fine, in all practical senses, but I have never purchased a phone for it’s camera. And I’ve never considered a mobile phone camera to truly manifest any of the prerequisite qualities of an actual camera. The evenings excursion, however, proved the iPhone camera otherwise.

recording visual images

I’ve always been a sucker for cameras. For me, nothing feels better than a fully manual, traditional camera. I like to feel the mechanics of a good camera in my hands. Digital cameras have always felt a bit foreign to me, but for the convenience, they are winning.

For the first time, the poor, grainy quality of a mobile phone camera became an asset at the Edwardian Ball and I ended up capturing some of the most compelling, apropos images of the event. The photos below, as well as the one I used in the title image for this post, were all taken with my iPhone 2 mega pixel camera. They have not been manipulated in any way.

Kinetic Steam Works installation

Kinetic Steam Works crew, manning the boiler

I was completely impressed, though I will admit, the subject at hand, made the exception. You can view more of my photos on Flickr. You can also see a collective posted in the Flickr group, Edwardian Ball.

Despite my enthusiasm for my iPhone photos, my chap August managed to capture the winner this evening, with something a device slightly more confident than 2 mega pixels. To top it off, it’s a picture of me.

Outside the Edwardian Ball

2007 leaves behind a blistery stint in Buffalo, NY and, thankfully, my last ever phone pictures (below) taken from my never-to-be-missed Pocket PC.

From this vantage point, the new year could only look spectacular in the least (not that I have anything against Buffalo).

Dystopic snow scene from Buffalo, NY

Looking forward to the semantic web trending we should see in 2008.

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

It’s kind of funny, looking back. Computer’s that can SMS you, hardly seems novel. But the fact is, these are the baby steps that are seriously changing the landscape for web development. Today we’re talking about web browsers, but we’re already seeing the erosion of differentials between stand-alone applications and web applications. In fact, if you consider the necessity for online software updates, there really isn’t any. What does this mean for web design?

Mashable.com probably said it best, when they reviewed Kadoink.

If Twitter Were On Steriods, You’d Have Kadoink
Kristin Nicole on Mashable.com

Well, almost . . . aside from misspelling “steroids”. Come on guys, it’s the title of your article! Anyway, I digress.

Mobile web design in 5 years?

I touched upon some of the set backs for mobile web design in my post media=”handheld”, and again with iThumb, but what I didn’t talk about was what all this means for mobile web design in the years to come.

KaDoink is a good example. They’ve extended the traditional web 2.0 social networking beyond the web browser and translated it for complete mobile integration. Egad! If Second Life subjugates the real world as a virtual fantasy, KaDoink liberates the technology of the virtual web, into our daily lives. Well, that sounds a little too profound, but it is the breaching of these boundaries that will shape the world of web design in the coming years.

So, where do I see mobile web design in 5 years?

I’ll put it this way; We’ll all have jet packs, so Google Maps will be obsolete. We won’t need online project management applications like Base Camp, because dodgeball will take over and we won’t need to sleep anymore, because there will be sleeping pills. Oh wait, we already have something like that. Not sure what that has to do with mobile web design anyway. The point is, I haven’t the slightest idea. But I’ll say this, how we think about the web is always changing. Web browsers were designed for computers, to access the web. Why should we expect the same thing for a mobile device?

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

The iThumb works like this: Each accessory kit comes with 48 silicone pads that adhere to the insides of your thumbs (Fig. 1). The silicone pads provide a reduced surface area for each of your texting thumbs, allowing you to accurately type the correct letters and/or numbers in your correspondence. The derma-bond adhesive used for the Thumb Buds ™ is a durable, protein-based formula that holds it’s bond for up to 10 days. This non-toxic adhesive is the same adhesive used by surgeons and those who suspend large pachyderms from flying helicopters, but it’s easily removed with just a spritz of fresh water.

Figure 1

the future of mobile web

So the question arises, will the iPhone change the horizon for mobile web? My response, probably not by itself. With the iThumb? Increasingly likely. The iPhone hasn’t really revolutionized anything with mobile web. To the best of my knowledge, “adaptive zooming” has been around for some time. Sure it’s nice to be able to pull up a web site on your mobile device and have it look the same as it does on your desktop, but is it convenient? I guess that depends on the web site and your wireless plan. Data transfer costs can be a killer if you pay by kb.

None-the-less, Apple has made something, maybe not revolutionary, but a heck of a lot of fun. And that does have the potential to influence change, if you ask me. It’s not a technological change we’ll see, so much as it is a change in expectations. No, it’s not new. But Apple has managed to bring the state of the mobile web, to the mainstream headlines like no one else. This may not change the game, but it certainly ups the anti.