In a sense, desktop applications could be designed without context in mind, because there really was only one context: the user is sitting at a desk working on the computer. In this context, and because the PC only worked using abstractions upon abstractions, it was okay for the user interface to dominate what we were doing. Everything was artifice anyway, so it only made sense for artifice to dominate.

That isn’t the case with mobile devices. What’s powerful about mobile devices is that they exist to complement what we are already doing, rather than be our primary focus. Whereas users mold themselves around how PCs work—users only work on PCs while their focus is entirely on them—mobile devices are used while doing other things. They’re used while waiting in line at the grocery store, when out to dinner, watching television, driving somewhere (by passengers!), or walking somewhere. Mobile devices are used almost entirely while doing something else, for relatively short periods of time, and usually, to accomplish a very specific task. What groceries do I need to buy? What time does the movie start? How do I get to that restaurant? What’s the weather going to be like? etc.

What this means is that designing applications for mobile means that context—for what purpose it will be used, how, and where—should be the first and primary consideration. It must define everything about how the application is designed, from the application’s concept to the physical design itself. It also means, though, that mobile applications are tools, a means of accomplishing a task and getting on with what the user is doing. Mobile applications should be cogs which seamlessly fit into an existing process—say, finding a restaurant to eat at—and make it better.

That’s precisely what a tool is: something which requires very little explanation for how to use it, because it is designed so precisely for its purpose, that how to use it is obvious. If you’re trying to dig a hole with your hands, you don’t need much explanation for how to use a shovel. “This is the handle” is about the extent of it.

There is no interface, in other words. There are no complicated concepts to learn first, no keyboard commands—just something which makes immediate sense, because it was designed precisely for what the user is trying to do. The application’s underlying concept should match the user’s.

Of course, there are cases where this really isn’t possible. Some purposes are so complex that even the best solutions are too sophisticated to be immediately understood, and even in simpler cases, it’s difficult to achieve. But that should be the goal.

What we should be trying to create are applications that are designed so specifically to the user’s context that the application ceases to feel like software—a finicky piece of artifice that we have to strain to understand and play with to get it to do what we want—and begins to feel like a physical object, something that just is and just works a certain way and we know will work that way.

My next feeling was sympathy. I’ve made plenty of mistakes (and I’ll tell you about one in a minute), and other people have surely enjoyed my errors from time to time.

Here’s the thing about uploading contacts without notice or permission: it’s wrong, and the Path folks know that. But it’s also true that launching a new social network is difficult. There’s a great deal of friction. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to connect to their friends in the system and to add new friends — and people don’t want to type in a bunch of email addresses.

In Path 2.0.6, released to the App Store today, you are prompted to opt in or out of sharing your phone’s contacts with our servers in order to find your friends and family on Path. If you accept and later decide you would like to revoke this access, please send an email to service@path.com and we will promptly see to it that your contact information is removed.

That’s the right thing to do. They did make a mistake—a mistake, it’s worth pointing out, that I think most applications with this sort of feature probably also make—by not requesting permission first. I don’t have a problem with a service I trust uploading my contacts for that purpose, but doing it without notifying me, let alone asking my permission, doesn’t engender trust.

What they’re doing now does. My view is Path was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and while that doesn’t excuse a mistake, it does mean that when they say they screwed up, they’re sorry, and they’re fixing it, there’s no reason not to accept it.

Well done, Path, for doing the right thing.

Goodbye, Twitter for iPad.

Using image-recognition technology, Shortcut recognizes what you’re reading. Once recognized, you can share the digital version of the pages via Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and email, or store them in Evernote. This works with over 1,000 newspapers and magazines worldwide. (See http://www.kooaba.com/products/shortcut for a list of publications.)

Shortcut also works with advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and billboards with the Shortcut icon. After taking a picture of such an ad, you gain access to extras such as coupons, sweepstakes, or store locators.

With Shortcut you no longer need to type links into your phone, google for information, or cut out articles – Just take a picture instead!

Shortcut is available for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

You can watch it on the AppleTV by selecting “iTunes Live” from the Internet menu. It’s worth pointing out that isn’t an option right now, so Apple will be adding it to the list—which means Apple has the ability to add new options to the AppleTV on the fly without issuing updates. That’s certainly a nice capability to have if you want to stream other events—like, say, sporting events.

It can figure out: is that sequence of dates and dollar figures likely to be an asset price? Or is it the amount of lemonade that people bought? It uses some heuristics based on seeing to what extent this looks like [random data] and to what extent it looks like independent samples to guess whether it’s actually an asset price — and given that it thinks it’s an asset price, it will go ahead and figure out a growth rate summary.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 4S, and Siri along with it, I wrote that I was most excited about Siri because it was a large step toward a time when all the world’s data is easily searchable and comparable. I wrote:

Let’s use Microsoft as an example again. Right now, if I wanted to see their operating profit as a percentage of sales from 1995-2005, I would need to find their financial statements, locate the data contained in them, and make the calculations myself. If I wanted to do anything useful, I would have to import it into a spreadsheet application (most likely by hand). Rather than doing this myself, though, I could just ask a future version of Siri for Microsoft’s operating margin between 1995 and 2005, and it would return that data to me in a table and chart.

Then I can ask it to compare Microsoft’s operating margin over that period compared to Hewlett-Packard’s, Dell’s and Apple’s.

Wolfram Alpha is getting there. We’re not very far away, and that’s a very big deal. The web has made access to data mostly free and accessible to everyone, but finding the right data is still a terribly hard thing to do. You have to manipulate a search engine to narrow its results down to what you want, physically look through pages and pages of links, and then—once you find the data you need—convert it into a usable format. That’s an incredible waste of time and deterrent to good research and real innovation. Where Wolfram Alpha is heading is where there’s none of that, because the service does it for you.

They’re one of the most exciting companies today.

So, if tripling the size of the social network to 3,000,000,000 users is not going to be enough to justify its valuation with its current revenue per user, there is only one strategic direction for Facebook to go. It needs to generate more revenue per user. A lot more.

Dead-on. By going public, Facebook will be under more pressure to increase the amount of revenue they generate from each user, and for good reason: even if every human being alive used Facebook, they still wouldn’t make very much revenue. They have no choice but to make more money per user.

Madrigal speculates they’ll increase how many adverts users see and push Facebook Payments. I think that’s right, but it’s only a part of it. I think Facebook wants to be the web platform, the platform that the rest of the web (and real-world businesses) are built on top of. By graphing how the world’s social relationships connect, and by allowing/pushing individuals to share more about themselves and what they do, they could be the most important advertising, public relations and consumer research channel for companies that’s ever existed, and the only platform software developers need to be on.

The latter might be a bit surprising, but imagine if a large portion of Facebook’s 850 million users sign up for Facebook Payments. If Facebook built something which allowed their third-party applications to run on actual devices, and not just the web, wouldn’t that be a great platform to develop for (financially)? Apple’s App Store has been successful for developers because Apple built it on top of the iTunes Music Store, which had tens of millions of people’s credit card information already stored, so purchasing a new application was as easy as buying a song. In March, Apple said they had 200 million iTunes customers with credit cards on file. There’s no reason why Facebook couldn’t equal, or surpass, that number.

So, that’s my bet. Facebook will, at some point in the next few years, no longer be just a social network where people also happen to play games. Facebook will instead be an all-encompassing platform where you can purchase (HTML5-based) applications to run on your mobile devices, purchase goods from other companies, and for companies to “connect” with you. They want to be the platform for the web, the utility people, companies and organizations use to find, communicate with and sell to their customers.

(Via Marco Arment.)

The last year or so has, at least on the hardware side, been nothing but a big, pregnant pause for Apple. I knew that Jobs’s death would have an impact, but I never feared Apple would be rudderless without him. Current Apple CEO Tim Cook is a good manager with a deep understanding of Apple, but I do not think he has Jobs’s innate vision.

I know all this will change in short order. Before his death, Jobs and his team laid the groundwork for a host of new products. Apple will unveil an iPad 3 as early as March. We could see the iPhone 5 in June. Then, perhaps, it’ll be business as usual for the wildly successful tech company (which now has a boatload of cash to spend—certainly enough to afford every single Super Bowl XLVI commercial). Whatever Apple introduces this spring, it will be the company’s first hardware introduction since Jobs’s death: in other words, a huge test for Apple and for Cook.

So, because Apple released the iPhone 4S—which merely has a dramatically better camera, Siri, and a much improved processor—Apple is “rudderless” without Jobs. Okay. Fine. Let’s leave that fish alone in the barrel.

But then, in the next paragraph, Ulanoff then states Jobs and his team laid the groundwork for a host of new products before he died. So let me get this straight, Ulanoff: the lack of “new” devices since Jobs’s death indicates that Apple is in trouble without him, yet Jobs also helped create a pipeline of new products to be released after his death.

Perhaps in his bizarro reality these two statements make sense together. Whatever the case, this is the garbage which passes as analysis on Mashable. Not that you needed an excuse not to ever read that site again, but here’s as good a reminder as any of why it’s a waste of time.

Frankly, it is a bit of an embarrassment for many commentators that the (admittedly weak) recovery is coming right after the end of the fiscal stimulus. Of course this does not refute the standard account of fiscal policy, namely that it can work but is hard to pull off politically in a manner which contributes to sustainable growth. The correct answer for the timing of recovery, relative to the end of stimulus, is “confounding factors,” but that is exactly the point. The confounding factors are more important than we had thought, and the fiscal stimulus not quite as important as we had been led to believe. That is another point against the Old Keynesian view.