"Anointing a group of gestures as “First Class” implies that there’s at least a second class. These are the gestures that shouldn’t be used a primary interface mechanism. Second Class Gestures seem disconnected from their resulting action or state change. They seem arbitrary and opaque in much the same way as keyboard shortcuts on the desktop. They usually require a reference or tutorial to learn, and even then after some amount of repetition." Good thoughts here on designing gestures for interaction on touch screens.

Citing the three main reasons as "Quality, Audience, & Constraints", Nate Bolt's piece on Instagram is worth a look.

"This is our flat, bright friend, even as our flesh and blood brothers and sisters sit beside us, each set of eyes shining with the glow, illuminated by the blue light as flat as the world once was. We can see past the Screen. We can see out into the world, but the Screen wants us, wants our eyes to return."

Speaking of Instapaper, here's an interview with Marco Arment. The meat is towards the end (annoyingly, split over onto a second page, so Instapaper users have to use print page hacks), where he talks about adding a full API and social features.

An interesting analysis of upload lag for the Sydney dust storm. I wonder if you'd get different results for, say, Glastonbury, or the Thames tunnel walks? (Now there's a todo. Oops.)

A longish but interesting Economist article about the (apparently decreasing) regional and cultural variations in the use of mobile telephones (whose name itself betrays your regional affiliation, as discussed early on).

I liked the photos of the AT&T war room ^W^W control centre ^W center in the New York Times article, but Ben Fry takes the time to do write a great response.

"Despite some of the flakiest mobile-network coverage in the developed world, one in four households has now gone mobile-only." An Economist leader on the consequences of the switch from landline to cellular telephony in the US.

"What now is going to be killer interesting is will there become a legal fight in the Control layer or not. It did not happen in the past paradigm 'soft keys', when Nokia let the others do soft keys, to the great benefit of humanity in my opinion."

"in addition to multi-touch [on the G1], the other feature that Apple objected to was using a standard headphone jack. Apple apparently owns a patent on controlling software using buttons connected by a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (at least for music and video playback controls)" If true, this might be the most annoying patent in a long while.

Matt Jones at PSKF: "We need to understand the difference between location and place" (Yes; Twitter > Dodgeball); 'He's frustrated with the disembodied way that we engage with mobile devices: "beautiful shiny plastic things with some gangly bag of mostly water tapping away on them"'

Apparently Camera Finder shows the iPhone being the first mobile to break into the top five cameras. I can't say I'm surprised; although it's damned near awful as modern camera phones go, it comes with a data plan that doesn't make you fret about uploading, nor a UI that makes it feel like hell. It's probably the first decent camera-enabled networked phone in the US, fwiw (Nokia never broke that market).

"With the protocol now reverse engineered, I wrote an Android client in about a week. Now you can remote control your iTunes from your new Android phone" Impressive. Shame that DAAP itself has encryption, otherwise you could stream to Android phones. (I have no idea why Apple don't offer a client.)

"I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we're trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on."

"I set up a google code project, checked in the 'Email' app's original source code and started in with a regex-shaped chainsaw. When I was done K-9 was born." Yes, a fork of the original Android email app, on their app store. I shouldn't need to mention MailWrangler now, right?

Ah, handy. I've been having trouble with the PC map loader; maybe this will be happier. (Edit: it wasn't. Maybe the N73 isn't supported any more?)

Yet another web site wrapped in an iPhone application. Oddly, it's not available in the UK, despite being presented on the UK YouTube site by a British person.

"the iPhone has been more successful as a word-of-mouth hit" "[Nokia's] smartphone had found a niche ... but most of the potential of an open, flexible device ... was ignored by most of the people who had one"

"TODAY processes the communication activity on Symbian based mobile phones. It runs on the background monitoring incoming and outgoing calls and messages" "Based on your phone usage, the program generates a graphic of your communication"

"you can use (drum solo, please) Flickr::Upload::FireEagle to not only geotag your photos but, in turn, use your photos to update FireEagle itself"

Looks like it might be a nice demonstration of tying together web apps to provide a service, but why the geographically limited alpha? Oh well, patience is apparently a virtue.

The 9" version of the Eee has a better horizontal resolution (good for those sites that insist on a fixed 960px or so width (hi Apple, BBC.... damn near everyone)) and more SSD storage, but still has poor battery life. Also, explicit XP/storage tradeoff.

"Over the Air presentation by Tom Hume and Bryan Rieger of Future Platforms about the PrimeSky project they did for the Royal Observatory at Greewich" Looking forward to this launching.

It's a good thing I don't fly in Europe much, and that this won't work over the Atlantic. Now, if they'd allowed SMSes only, I'd probably be OK with it.

John Dvorak in spectacular missing-the-point form. He even admits that he's an old fool who shouldn't be writing about computing any more (well, that's my interpretation anyway).

Slightly overblown headline for a grab-bag of stories from 3GSM, including Nokia's maps for pedestrians (rather than just drivers) to tie in to their increasing shipping of (A)GPS capabilities.

Amidst all the praise for Google's new mobile map app, Chris asks some pertinent questions about where their data comes from, and concludes it's probably the users.

Interesting. As usual the Americans don't get it, but Jaiku's very interesting. I wonder if Yahoo will finally buy Twitter now; its API would fit nicely with the delicious/flickr lineup they already have.

Tim O'Reilly on presence, the address book, phones, and third-party iPhone development. Look out for Mark Pilgrim's comment.

"sales of PDAs shrank 40% in the first quarter of this year" "To make the [Foleo], Palm had bought in Linux software and tools from specialist supplier Wind River - even though Palm engineers were also working on an in-house Linux platform" Doomed?

I could really do with sorting out some method of getting SMSes to people that doesn't rely on broadcast like Twitter. It has to support the UK though.

A(nother (see Zonetags)) Yahoo! Research project. Looks obvious in hindsight. Wonder if I'll ever get around to buying a phone that's shiny enough?

Am I the only person to notice the entity encoding error this page throws in Safari? Whoever asked "how did this take so long" also had a point. Finally, the logged in page has 6x as many bookmarks as the logged out.

I don't have an E series phone, and I'm not likely to. This is entirely for Mark.

Nice that the title and URL match. It's nowhere in the Google results for MusicStation yet, by the way.

"Nokia plans to start offering the smart2go application for free, on Saturday, February 10th, for selected Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0 devices"... "plans to roll out support for most of the major mobile OS platforms"

"Students should sit exams in metal-lined rooms to block mobile phone signals amid fears that technology is fuelling a "substantial" increase in cheating, a Government-backed study said yesterday."

Looks like Python for the S60 phones has, er, XML issues. Also, Growl tiein. Might be nicer. +1 on the call for a buddy icon API. (hmm, does Flickr let you get them?)

Semacodes make the Guardian. I hadn't realised there were competing standards; sigh.

Tying contacts, Flickr and blogs together on phones. A bit like Flame was meant to do for IM, sigh oops. And other mobile musings.

£28bn of overvaluing on the shares? Ouch ouch ouch.

Where are the bedroom programmers/services for mobiles? Put off by the operators, that's where, argues Vic Keegan

Sounds stupid to me. Doesn't work on SE phones either. Go Java!