Posts by Drew Myler

With an eye toward making the IM application easier and more enjoyable to use, we’ve spent the past month making refinements and updates to nearly every screen you’ll encounter when creating and editing campaigns, lists and messages.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that these changes are live! When you log in to your account, you’ll notice that things look different, though not unfamiliar. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Refined navigation: campaigns + lists

Everything in our application revolves around campaigns and lists, so we’ve tightened up the navigation around those core functions.

To bring commonly used functions closer to the surface, we’ve added dropdown menus to the navigation. Many regular activities are now quickly accessible from anywhere in the application.

Better campaign filtering

You can now sort campaigns by type or keyword. We’ve also changed our default sort to show the most recently created campaigns at the top of your screen. Recently active campaigns and lists can also be accessed when you first log in to the dashboard.

Simpler campaign and message creation

We’ve revisited every create and edit page to streamline the process of launching and editing your campaigns.

Descriptions get promoted

We used to identify campaigns and lists by keyword. We’re now aligning them with the campaign description you enter when creating a campaign or list. We’ve used it this way for awhile now, and find it’s easier to locate campaigns and lists.

If you’re a current client of ours, we’d love to get your feedback on these updates, so please let us know what you think.

We’ll be introducing some exciting new features over the next three months. Look out for more frequent customer communication like this and please reply with any questions or feedback.

nextstop offers a smartphone app that finds your location and recommends entertainment spots and restaurants near you. The app is easy to use and blazingly fast — but it can’t be found in Apple’s App Store or in Google’s Android App Marketplace. Instead, nextstop built the app using HTML5 and delivers it via the mobile web. (Learn more about nextstop’s decision to forego the App Store.)

We’ll no doubt see more companies follow suit if for no other reason than economics. Google reports that 60,000 phones running Android are shipped every day. That’s a far cry from the 40 million iPhones in circulation, but it isn’t a drop in the bucket, either. The smartphone playing field is starting to level, and companies that want to reach the growing non-iPhone smartphone market will either need to build another app — which will double development costs — or find another solution. (Even Google agrees that native application development will be too costly to remain sustainable in the long term.)

It’ll be interesting to see if nextstop has timed this move correctly — will the public understand an app outside of the store? Will mobile apps be as successful in their adoption rates? I hope so, but I foresee some hurdles.

The largest challenge: marketing and distribution. People know the app store and rely on it to find and categorize apps. Using the App Store is largely a discovery process; I’m a news junkie, so show me popular news apps. I may never know your company until I stumble across your app in the store. That’s a potential customer/user base of 40 million people, and it’s hard to ignore that kind of exposure. With a mobile web app, the opposite is true; I have to start with you in mind, and know (or hope) that you have a mobile app.

There’s also an existing understanding of how you ‘get’ an app. With native apps, you visit the store, find an app and install it. The process is entirely different with the mobile web. There’s no central, trusted repository, nothing to download, no recommendations, and nothing to ‘open’ on your phone (though you can add a shortcut to the mobile app on your phone’s home screen). Instead you fire up your mobile browser and navigate to the app. An evolution in the perception of what an app ‘is’ has to occur so users realize your mobile app is the same thing they would’ve gotten in the store.

I hope the early adopters of mobile web apps succeed, because the benefits to mobile web application development using HTML5 are pretty enticing (and yes, I’m aware the HTML5 spec is far from finalized):

• It’s easier to deploy. Launching and releasing updates to the app is dependent solely on you, not a third party’s review process.
• It’s cheaper. Supporting multiple mobile browsers is more cost-effective than supporting multiple apps and code bases.
• It’s native app-esque. HTML5 lets developers tap into many of the phone’s functions, including location awareness, thus blurring the lines between mobile and native app.
• It’s fast. HTML5′s offline storage makes the mobile app as responsive as a native app when loading new pages.

Until there’s a distribution model for mobile apps that mirrors the popularity of Apple’s app store, are we largely stuck building native apps? I’m curious as to whether other mobile developers are building web apps instead of native ones, or if you’re holding back for specific reasons. Hope you’ll chime in.