The usability guru Dr Jakob Nielsen just published a free 93-page report on iPad usability. In his report he
critiques the most important iPad’s usability failings and points out how Apple should allow more diversity on its platforms including the option for Adobe Flash.

“For once, I’m on the side of Flash,” he says, “because I think Apple is trying to over-rigidly control what’s on its devices. I can understand there are benefits to doing that, but there are also benefits to the diversity of the internet. Diversity is a very powerful mechanism. In the early days of the web, there were many alternatives that were closed services – AOL, CompuServe, Trilogy – but on the web, anybody could put up anything, including a lot of bad stuff. But users vote with their feet, or their clicks: they can click away from bad Flash and click towards good Flash. It’s a shame Apple is so restrictive on what they allow on the iPad and the iPhone. When a customer has bought a device, it’s theirs; they should be able to see the information they want, and run the applications they want.”

Completely agree with him! Read the full article from guardian.co.uk.

People at teehanlax.com published a lot of useful mobile design resources on their blog in the past, but I found this great Palm Pre GUI PSD template only today. You can find a list of available design resources from teehanlax here. Enjoy!

The N8 is a powerful combination of internet, video, photos, music, maps with Symbian^3 operating system. With a large capacitive touch screen supporting pinch to zoom, social networking integration, a Carl Zeiss 12 megapixel camera with wide-angle lens and Xenon flash, shooting 720p HD video, On Demand WebTV, HDMI connectivity and USB OTG, you can create, discover and share a world of creativity. Additionally, for the software developers, the device includes Qt 4.6.2, Java MIDP 2.1 and Flash Lite 4.0.

Available late summer 2010, the Nokia N8 should be the first device using the long awaited Symbian^3 operating system. I said “should” because there’re some rumors out there about a Symbian ^3 device to be released soon somewhere in Asia. Can’t wait to finally see AIR mobile running on a Symbian device… maybe we’ll be lucky with the N8?

From today the iPad, the revolutionary Apple tablet, is finally available for italian customers! You can take a look to the iPad specifications here… Prices and plans are a little bit expensive but if you were waiting for this event you can finally get your dream gadget from one of the official stores or directly online from Apple. Good luck!

The Wired iPad application just went live on the AppStore. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. A great example about how to improve user experience depending on the media we’re using. Take a look at the video above or read more from Wired.

As many of you know Nokia is focused on emergin technologies and news, there is a project inside the research web site of Nokia related to the augmented reality that looks to me very interesting.

The Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project (MARA) explores utilizing camera equipped mobile devices as platforms for sensor-based, video see-through mobile augmented reality. The project also investigates new and exciting applications enabled by this technology, and UI solutions and paradigms motivated by the restrictions of the mobile devices.

You can get all the info about hardware, demos, and how it works from this page.

WhyMCA Spring 2010 is the first italian Mobile Developer Conference. An event oriented to developers and mobile enthusiasts. The conference is scheduled for friday, May 21 in Milan (Politecnico di Milano – Campus Bovisa) and it’s completely free. Read more and register here.

Forum Nokia just released and useful AIR tool for mobile prototyping: Flowella.

Flowella is an easy to use tool that enables designers and developers to create design prototypes — without writing a line of code. Prototypes are built using images of screen mock-ups and defining links between the screens. This information is then used to create an Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 application or Web Runtime (WRT) widget. These applications can then be run on one of over seventy Nokia devices or in a simulator supplied with Flowella, enabling the application interaction to be assessed.

Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality. The augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced AR technology (e.g. adding computer vision and object recognition) the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally usable. Artificial information about the environment and the objects in it can be stored and retrieved as an information layer on top of the real world view. The term augmented reality is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time. Read more »

Hi! Below you can find the presentation I created for the last mobile dev day in Rome this year. Enjoy!