My friend, Ed Melendez, hipped me to a recent post by Jakob Nielsen outlining his latest thinking on investing in mobile applications vs. investing in the development of mobile sites. I found it interesting because the first insight was not what I expected:

Ship mobile apps if you can afford it.

I had not expected this recommendation but I after reading his analysis I get where he is coming from. Today, we can often deliver a user experience via mobile applications that is superior to that which can be delivered via a mobile website.

However, the nuance of his discussion comes as he looks forward. Insight number 2:

Be aware that the cost of mobile apps will increase as platforms proliferate.

Not only the cost of developing for an increasing number of platforms but the ongoing maintenance of applications and the data. This should be a serious concern for many organizations and underscores the second half of his original statement: Ship mobile apps if you can afford it.

Insight 3:

In the long-term, mobile sites are the way to go.

While there are some user experience trade-offs today, developing mobile sites rather than investing in mobile apps will help you avoid excessive development and maintenance costs associated with mobile apps, will allow you to avoid paying money to various app store owners, and — perhaps most importantly — will allow better integration with the larger world of the web.

In the end, Nielsen reiterates what he said back in 1999, the internet will defeat smaller, closed environments.

And in the end, that is good for us and for our clients. I recommend reading Nielsen’s full analysis

We have been advising our clients for some time now not to waste resources coding to support Microsoft Explorer IE-6. Now Microsoft is saying the same thing: Good Riddance.

“Time to pop open the champagne because based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usages in the US has now officially dropped below 1%,” blogged Roger Capriotti, Microsoft’s director of Internet Explorer marketing.

“We hope this means more developers and IT pros can consider IE6 a ‘low priority’ at this point and stop spending their time having to support such an outdated browser,” he added.

We couldn’t agree more.

I’ve always been a big fan of Terry Gilliam’s work. His utopian, dystopian, and just plain interesting worlds have fascinated me since I first discovered the Monty Python as a kid. His mixing of past and future, mythology and modernism is unparalleled. So I enjoyed reading some of his thoughts on the creative process.

I refuse to intellectualize, or try to understand how it happens. It happens, and I just try to ride with it. And the frightening thing is when it doesn’t happen, it’s actually terrifying because you realize, “I’ve dried up. It’s finally happened: the well is empty.” But, then if you get through those periods, then something starts happening again. A lot of what happens, it’s like doing a painting without actually doing a sketch in advance. You just start and you got this, you add another thing, boom, boom, boom.

Terry Gilliam: On Ideas, Unlearning & Avoiding Debt

This post contains two things I love — neither of which am I terribly good at: surfing and photography.

Be sure to check out both videos. One shows the final product but the other gives a bit of the background — at least as well as a bunch of surfers can explain it — of how they did it. Great intersection of technology, creativity, and waves.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to remark on this, but I can’t get over how poetic this intersection is. Only in New Orleans would Jefferson Davis Parkway dead end at Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.

Once again Roger over at 2d Code  points us to a cool new possibility for implementing QR codes. QRpedia.org  is a website which will generate QR Codes for any wikipedia entry. Beyond this, the QRpedia code resolves back to their servers where the information from the HTTP header is used to determine the mobile devices’ preferred language and deliver the Wikipedia article in that language. As Roger points out, this technology is

ideal for museums and far superior to resolving to an entry in the same language for every user.

2d Code has a great example posted so you can see this in action . I believe there are interesting possibilities for this technology in retail settings — especially in a place like New Orleans (or other tourist destinations) — to provide shoppers with relevant information when people may not be shopping in their native language.

I first read Chris Palmieri’s article, “How Responsive Web Design Becomes Responsive Web Publishing,”  a couple weeks back. Since then I’ve found myself thinking about the implications and opportunities of his exploration.

Rather than thinking about mobile devices first and foremost as ‘mobile’, Chris asks us to think about them as  personal devices . This has profound implications for how these devices might interact with the web to deliver a customized user experience. Beyond that, however, it begs us as designers to think about how we might reframe our content to deliver meaningful information to users we now know just a bit more about — such as where they are.

Chris created a demo showing how content of a news story — in this case a map of the recent riots in London — might be improved by incorporating location information from a mobile device. Be sure to visit his demo at  “ http://aqworks.com/articles/responsive/  from your mobile phone and see how this new content approach increases understanding of an event that for many of us was distant and abstract.

If you are interested in responsive web design, responsive web publishing deserves some consideration. And Chris’s article is a great place to start.

Draw your own stickman and  go on a HTML5 adventure. In order to play, make sure you have a modern browser !

No matter how far you travel. No matter how exotic the location or the people. Everything looks the same when you are staring at your iPhone, your Facebook feed, your…

Look up! Be present. Talk to the stranger next to you. Don’t travel hundreds of miles only to remain in the same place.

Google, in their on-going quest to omnipotence has released a fantastic tool called the  Ngram Viewer  which basically lets you search the frequency of specific words over the entire Google Books directory. And then it spits out a fancy graph of the data. Crazy, right?

Even better is that I used it to finally settle a long-term score: most popular recurring monster/menace in literature history.

If I were a betting man, the smart money was probably on Vampires, but who knew Pirates were that popular for that long?

And what on earth happened in the 1980s? Did Isaac Asimov just go bananas at his typewriter? I mean, don’t get wrong, I  love  robots and all, but this is taking it a bit far, no?