• Free-to-Play. Find a way to let dedicated users pay more to get more stuff, but offer free functionality to everybody who asks
• Compulsion Loops. Find ways to get people hooked into coming back to your software in order to satisfy some compulsion
• Engaged Communities. Give up some control to bring your users into a community with one another.

I was really interested in his retelling of the EVE Online community responding to something called GoonSwarm. I can’t quite follow the internal politics of the game, but I can see that thousands of users organized themselves into highly effective ad hoc groups in order to battle one another within the game. Are your users that passionate and engaged?

• Learn how to talk about what you do to people who have no idea what you’re talking about.

Her evangelical zeal is very refreshing; I can imagine her listening to all these tech talks and thinking, “none of this is going to save you if your team can’t talk to each other.”

• Don’t drop truth bombs

She urges us to imagine what non-technical clients who haven’t thought about iterations and known bugs will hear when you talk about bugs.

• Don’t define scope in a consulting proposal

Instead, define the requirements collaboratively alongside the client. You have no idea what you’re talking about when you start!

Our goal is to collect as much real-life feedback as possible about the Marketplace’s design, usability, performance, reliability, and content. Feedback from early adopters helps us enhance the quality of the Marketplace before it is released to larger audiences.

The developers we’ve talked to so far are excited to be listed in the Firefox Marketplace when it opens. They’re creating great app experiences with the Web technologies they’ve already mastered. They’re getting timely and thoughtful critiques from our Marketplace app reviewers.

In addition to being a cool site, Firefox Marketplace also offers APIs for app submission, payments, and app discovery. Like everything Mozilla does, this ecosystem is always open — users have choices and developers have control over their content, functionality and distribution.

The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) and the DevHub contain extensive documentation, FAQs and emulation tools to help you get started building your App.

We need your feedback, and we need your Apps! Get Firefox Aurora for Android, learn about the Marketplace, and post your Apps to the Firefox Marketplace.

keep rockin’ the free web,
-Bill

Device context is different from User Context. Just because you know they have a small screen, you don’t know whether they’re focused or distracted, having a short or a long interaction.

Omitting content from the mobile version of your site is like an author looking at the paperback edition of their book and saying, “it’s smaller, I should leave out some chapters” — Josh Clark

Example: alibris.com omits their key differentiator, Rare Books, from their mobile site. Are we really sure people don’t want to buy rare books from their phone? 28% of mobile web users only surf from their phone. Phones are peers to our other devices, not just little siblings.

Example: The original Bank of America app showed you your balance and had a logout button. That was it.

Touch is only the current thing we want to figure out. Coming next are speech recognition, gesture recognition. Note: speech plus gesture recognition equals Harry Potter territory!

Nice detail: you can set up a visual gesture password by picking regions in a photo. In his case, he presses his son’s nose, then his daughter’s nose, then draws a line between them. Slick.

Using their WinJS library, you can get access to all the Metro styled controls and widgets. Using the Windows JS library, you get access to all the Windows device API’s.

• Build mobile products atop platforms designed for mobile products, lest you inherit a lot of technical debt
• No such thing as “write once, run everywhere.” Axis has 547 different mockups
• Abstract communication when possible
• Try to reduce fragmentation
• Refreshing WebViews (HTML parts) can be painful; usually, refresh when returning from background is enough for most cases
• It is very difficult to experiment in iOS and Android because it’s hard to do A/B testing
• Expect network craziness
• WebViews are not first class citizens in iOS

Axis has to solve this question — how do you produce the right HTML, JS, CS per runtime and per request? To solve it, sometimes JS runs in browser, sometimes on server. Other times there are “Native Bridges” for iOS and Android.

Adaptation in Mojito reacts to screen size, connection speed, feature detection, and so forth. YUI helps considerably with such adaptation.

Glossary:

• Mojito: a Javascript application framework using YUI and Node.js
• Shaker: a static asset rollup tool
• Mojit: a sub-application
• Cocktails: platform that includes Mojito