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AMSU White-Label brings the same power that’s behind Are My Sites Up to you in a way that lets you easily resell it to others and manage it all from a lovingly crafted web interface.

So, you’re a web designer/developer with a list of clients. In these times, we’re all looking for ways to increase revenue from, and value to our clients. What if you could do both, and keep an eye on your websites and theirs at the same time?  Now you can, and as a bonus, you can increase the effectiveness of your communication with them. Are My Sites Up White Label is a website monitoring service that was built with people like you in mind. It has plans for every budget, and a plan calculator that shows you how much money you can make from it, given a few details like how many sites you have and how much you plan to charge.

“Ok”, you say, “That covers increasing revenue and value to my clients, but what about enhancing my communication with them?”

Ah, you’re speaking of Broadcasts. They allow you to send short messages to all of your clients at once, or just a selected few. Here’s an example of how they help you to save time: You host email for all of your clients, and your email server has an issue. One by one, your customers realize that their email isn’t working, and they call you. You answer phone calls all day, saying to each customer that you’re aware of the issue and that it’s being worked on. Broadcasts solve this problem by letting you send a message to all of your customers at once, these arrive via Push Notification, SMS, email (and even via personalized, automated phone call) telling everyone what’s going on at once, so you get back to work.  Pretty awesome.

So what else is different about AMSUWL? It’s a full-fledged white label service, so your clients never have to know about AMSUWL – you can sell the service as if it were your own.  They can even build a custom iPhone app for you with your own logo, icon and colors, so that your brand is always on your clients’ phone screen, or you can use the white label app if you’d like. Your clients can install the app, log in and see their site status at any time. Clients can also log into the web app and view/manage their sites.

All of their plans have a 30-day free trial so you can start reselling the service and make money from it before they even charge you a cent.

As a special Fuel Your Apps bonus, the first 25 people who sign up for AMSUWL with the following link, http://amsuwl.com/aff/fuelya - will get 2 months free! Sound good? We think so!

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Ever wish you could travel back in time?  You know, hop in the silver Delorean like Marty McFly, choose a date, and once you hit 88 MPH, you’d be instantly whisked away to the date of your choosing?

Well, the folks over at MemoLane haven’t quite gotten that far, but they have developed a really cool and gorgeous way to view your internet history from some of your favorite internet services. In their own words, here’s what MemoLane is all about:

Memolane captures your entire online life in one timeline making it easy for you to travel back in time and re-live great memories. Whether you’d like to re-discover your holiday of a lifetime, re-live that great party last week or get all nostalgic about when the kids were little, now with Memolane it’s easy to keep the memories alive.  With Memolane you can easily view and explore your photos, music, tweets, updates, check-ins, blogs and more from all of your favorite online services in one place. Simply search your history using the Memolane timeline to step back in time and re-live great memories.

That’s a pretty big undertaking, and MemoLane does all of this relatively well.  I was easily able to add my Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, and Twitter accounts to my timeline.  The only hiccup I experienced was with Twitter, but remember, MemoLane is still in beta!

The timeline view is a cool way to see what you've been up to.

Here’s a breakdown of what MemoLane will let you do:

• Capture all your history in one place from your favorite Internet services.
• View photos, music, tweets, blogs, checkins, events and much more.
• Use a simple timeline to travel back in time with one click.
• Add friends, explore their Memolane and share memories.
• Explore and search your entire online life in one place.
• Search by location, people, events, time and more.
• Create Stories and invite your friends to contribute their content.
• Make your Memolane public so you can easily share your online memories from Twitter, Facebook and blogs.
• Protect your privacy by controlling who can access your Memolane.

The check-in map is cool. One hiccup - it showed me having checkins off the coast of Nigeria.

Again, there are a lot of moving parts here, but MemoLane really works quite well for something still in beta.  We are excited to see what the future holds for MemoLane!  It’s also definitely worth noting that MemoLane was the winner of “Startup Weekend Copenhagen 2010“.

For the time being, MemoLane will be maintaining a “members-only” status, but they were kind enough to hook us up with 500 invites!  Jump on over here, use the invite code “fuel“, and you’ll be on your way, get them till they’re gone!

A special thanks to MemoLane for providing us with these invites!  Excellent work!

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Momento is a unique diary writing app for iPhone & iPod touch, which provides a quick and easy way to record moments throughout your day..

A moment is basically a brief post that is accompanied by a photo or group of photos.  You can save each moment with a people, place, or custom tag and rate it on a scale of one to five stars.

One feature that the creators really nailed is the social media integration.  It allows you to quickly and effectively pull in feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Foursquare, Gowalla, Digg, YouTube, Vimeo, and custom RSS/Atom Feeds.  After adding these feeds, you can then browse a day-by-day view of all your online activity.

Momento makes all these moments and feeds fully searchable.  This means that if you want to find out the last time you checked in at your favorite restaurant or find an old tweet that had something you’d like to reference again it’s only a search away.

There are a few other features definitely worth mentioning.  Momento offers a passcode protection for those interested in keeping a more private journal.  Also, if you’re using an iOS4 device and are afraid of losing the moments you have the option to backup, restore, and export all your data within iTunes.

With such a solid feature set, an absolutely gorgeous interface, and $2.99 price tag I’d have to say that Momento is well worth it.  It’s currently available in the iTunes app store and you can follow Momento updates on twitter.

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Four months ago Bobby Ghoshal was living in Southern California with a couple very talented designers and was inspired to start working on a secret project with Matthew Ausonio.  It wasn’t long before his living room was covered with whitewashed paper, black and red ink, design books, and crushed up red bull cans.  They worked only during the night to create FLUD – a constant controlled flood of relevant news for each iPad user.  A month later, they released FLUD to the app store for approval that immediately sprung into one of the top three spots of iPad news reader apps accompanied by Pulse and Flipboard.  At four developers strong and currently not benefiting from any investors, they have tripled their user base and continue to push the envelope of relevant news delivery by releasing an iPhone version.

FLUD aggregates content from various news sources into a beautiful Windows Phone 7 like interface.  The iPhone version is slightly different than the iPad because each feed has its own dedicated screen real estate.  You’ll notice on the iPad that there are multiple feeds cluttered together on the same screen, but Ghoshal said that they are working on a complete overhaul of the iPad’s interface and will be pushing it out in early January.

Unlike Flipboard, which depends on your social networks to generate content, FLUD gives you the option to select feeds from their featured list, search the internet to find feeds, or even add them from your Google Reader account.  Currently there isn’t any Google Reader integration on the iPhone, but this is going to be pushed out along with some bug fixes in the update set for next week.

FLUD also gives you the ability to share interesting articles with others via Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.  It comes equipped with a heart icon that allows users to “Love It” which is similar to Facebook’s “Like” and lets other Fluders know that the article is worth a read.  This feature also allows you to read an article later – even if you’re offline.

Overall, FLUD is an excellent way to catch up on your latest news and discover new articles and feeds.  The FLUD team does have a few bugs to fix with the iPhone including some crazy text that shows up in the feed, but i’m sure those minor glitches will be worked out in the next update.  The iPad and iPhone apps are available in the app store for free right now and you can stay up to date by following the FLUD on twitter.

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Board games are one of those things that have stood the test of time.  Even with iPads, iPods, PSP’s, DS’s, etc…, board games are still very relevant.  And as wonderful as technology is, it can be very refreshing to play a good ‘ol fashioned board game every once in awhile.

The folks over at Tangorang Labs have just released Winter Land, and we’ve had an opportunity to try it out for ourselves.  Winter Land costs $1.99, and is solely for the iPad.

We have reviewed one other app developed by Tangorang Labs, and the Winter Land experience is pretty consistent with our previous review in terms of quality, presentation, and ease-of-use.

The premise of the game is quite simple:  The first person to get to Santa Claus wins!  You move your character around the virtual board by drawing cards.  Along your way, you may encounter special cards that either help or hinder your journey towards the man in red. Additionally, there are also slides and ladders that will either aid you in moving ahead, or assist you in taking a giant leap backwards.  Picture the classic board game concept of  ”Chutes and Ladders” or “Candy Land” , and you’ll get the idea.

Overall, this game is very well done.  The animation and graphics are fun, the music is catchy and not annoying, and the game hits a “sweet spot” when it comes to length.  If you want to treat yourself to an early Christmas present, head on over to the App Store and grab a copy today.

Finally, in the spirit of the season, we’re offering three promo codes for a free copy of Winter Land!  Shoot me a Tweet (@jaley) with the hashtag of #fuelyourapps prior to Noon on Sunday (Eastern time), and we’ll randomly select three lucky people!  Tell your friends!

*A special thanks to Tangorang Labs for hooking us up with the promo codes!

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Earlier this year many of us purchased a MacHeist bundle that unlocked a beta version of Tweetie 2 for Mac.  Shortly after that, the big dogs at Twitter acquired Tweetie and developer Loren Brichter – better known as Atebits.  Since then we have all been in suspense on if we will ever see Tweetie 2 for Mac.  For months I have tried various Twitter clients like Kiwi, Nambu, and even Itsy, but… they’re not Tweetie 2.

Today the team at Raptor Apps was feeling the Christmas spirit and released a beta version of Weet for Mac.  They are also the creators of Weet for iPhone which was released a few months back.  It’s currently available on iTunes for 99 cents.  Now I have obviously only been using Weet for Mac beta for a short while today, but I can see it definitely has potential of becoming a big player among the other Mac Twitter clients.  It’s minimalistic, clean, and well-polished even for a beta.  Weet comes packed with some of the more modern Twitter features and also adds a few others like muting users and blocking keywords.  The one thing that did throw me off with Weet is its inline tweet box.  I like the touch but you’ll notice that there is no submit or tweet button.  You’ll have to click Command + Enter to send your tweet.  The other option is in the General preference pane and allows you to send a tweet by pressing Enter.

While in beta it’s currently free and I’m not sure what the final price tag will look like or the date of an official release.  Check out the screenshots and then give it a try for yourself – let us know what you think.

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Delibar is a tool for searching, managing and storing your bookmarks on the cloud. Browse, tag, edit your bookmarks everywhere with Delibar for iPhone.

A little over a year ago Chad Engle wrote a post on Delibar, a Delicious Mac client.  If you are unfamiliar with Delicious (formerly del.icio.us), it is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.  It was founded in 2003 and then acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.  Delibar has also added support for Pinboard, if you aren’t a big Delicious bookmarks fan.

Personally, I have found that installing the official Delicious extensions for your browser of choice is the easiest route for creating new bookmarks.   However, having an app like Delibar touch is really nice for managing bookmarks on the go.  The setup was quick and painless and the interface makes it easy to navigate your way through the app.  An added bonus is that Delibar will open a bookmark within the application so it doesn’t require switching back and forth between mobile Safari.  Although it’s labeled for the iPhone, it is compatible with most iOS devices. I am secretly hoping they will release a separate iPad version in the near future.

Features

• Add/Edit/Delete bookmarks
• Multi-account support
• Global search across all your bookmarks
• Friends bookmark  access
• Ability to save searches
• Navigate bookmarks by tags
• Safari mobile integration (via bookmarklet)

Delibar touch for iPhone is available on iTunes for $1.99.  Follow @delibar on twitter.

Screenshots

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Today is Thanksgiving.  A time for remembering what and who you are thankful for.  I’m thankful for family, friends, health, etc…  But we’re about apps here, so let me share my Thanksgiving app story with you.

Yesterday evening, we began our 400-mile or so trek east, to the great state of Ohio.  This journey is really not too difficult, aside from the usually snarled traffic in Chicago.  To complicate matters, last evening, the weather in Chicago was reported to be lousy: rain, sleet, potential snow, heavy winds.  Include with this, the fact that it’s supposedly the busiest travel day of the year, and you have a recipe for a traffic nightmare.

Avoiding this traffic situation really is impossible.  But, there’s strength in knowing exactly where and when to expect the traffic snarls.  I decided to give INRIX Traffic! a try, which is available as a free app in the app store.  As you might have guessed, INRIX Traffic! was developed by INRIX, Inc.  I tested out the iPhone version, but they also offer up an iPad and Android version of their app.

I found this app to be really surprisingly good.  That’s not a slap at the folks at INRIX – quite the contrary.  Considering the fact that this is a free app, I had somewhat low expectations on usability, appearance, and accuracy.  I was really surprised – and did I mention the app is free?

Usability – This app is very usable.  It just makes sense.  I only tested the free features (there is a Pro version available within the app), but they all made sense.  Speaking of the Pro version, if you want to make that jump, it will set you back $9.99 for a year of Pro membership, or if you are a more long-term commitment type of person, there is a lifetime version available for $24.99.  Pro membership will give you additional features, such as enhanced commuting information and traffic cameras.  All of that sounds really nice, but honestly, the free app is pretty solid.

Appearance – I have seen some pretty ugly apps in my lifetime, but this is not one of them.  The real place where appearance matters in these types of apps is the maps; and INRIX Traffic! does a nice job at displaying maps, traffic conditions, and other potential incidents, construction zones, etc…

Accuracy – All of these cool features are useless if the app isn’t accurate.  INRIX Traffic! was extremely accurate on our Ohio-bound journey.  Traffic jams were accurately reflected, and construction zones were spot-on.

Also worth mentioning is that users can submit accidents, construction zones, “live police”, etc…  I’m not completely clear on how this is verified, and I didn’t want to become too distracted while driving!

Overall, I highly recommend this app for your next journey.  It does exactly what it says, and does it quite well.  And, in case I didn’t mention this before – the app is free!

Happy and safe travels!

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When I first purchased my iPad on launch day, I was very optimistic.  This was the device that was going to help me read more books, carry less laptops, and – *cough cough* – watch more Netflix.  And in many ways, the “magical” iPad has delivered on that promise.  For some strange reason, I do find myself reading more books, I will only bring my iPad with me on Thanksgiving, as opposed to a full-fledged laptop, and I definitely watch more Netflix!  What hadn’t occurred to me is that this thing could be a really good educational tool for our three boys, too.

So, my 4-year old and I decided to browse the iTunes App Store one fine morning, and came across ABC:  Look.  Listen.  Write. We decided to make the $1.99 plunge, and purchased the 67.6 MB app.

ABC:  Look.  Listen.  Write. was developed by Tangorang Labs, a self-described “team of semi-domesticated orangutans dedicated to spreading the fun through original and innovative mobile apps for the iPhone and iPad.”  I took a brief look at their site (which is rather cute), and they offer several other apps as well.

Anyway, we sat down and started our ABC:  Look.  Listen.  Write. adventure.  And for the most part, it was a fun journey.  Whenever I review educational apps, I like to look at the functionality, and of course, what kind of educational value the app offers, but just as important, I try to pay careful attention to the “independence” factor, too.  For example, my 4-year old doesn’t read yet, but that didn’t stop him from being able to figure out how to get started with this app, thanks to the simple splash screen accompanied with a very obvious “Start” button.

It doesn't get much easier than this.

Once you enter the app, it really is quite easy for a child to figure this process out.  The whole alphabet is presented to you, and the helpful voice prompts tell you to touch on a letter to get started.  Again, that all important “independence” factor!

After deciding which letter to tap on (that was easily a 2-3 minute process for us), you have several options available to you.  Initially, the screen will show you the letter you selected, a picture of something that represents that letter, and the lovely voice prompts will read to you as well (”K is for Knight”, etc…).  You can tap the speaker icon to hear the voice prompt again, tap the arrows to navigate through other letters, tap the pencil to enter the “tracing mode” (more on that in a minute), and there is also a home button that will return you to the letter selection screen.  So far, so good!

The “tracing mode” feature of this app is pretty well done.  It’s nothing fancy, but it doesn’t need to be, does it?  You are given a simple outline of a letter, and with just the dragging of a finger, you can trace that letter over and over again.  You can clear the screen to start over, tap the speaker to hear the letter and word combination again, navigate through other letters, flip back over to the word/picture combination screen, and head back to that letter selection screen.  Easy-peezy!  And, perhaps most importantly, this app was able to harness my son’s attention for over 10 minutes – which is quite an accomplishment.

There are a few improvements, to the “tracing mode” in particular, that would make this app even better.  My son can easily trace within the outlines of a given letter, but he doesn’t necessarily do it in the right order.  Some directional arrows of some sort would be a helpful addition for teaching kids how to create letters, rather than just learning how to outline them.  Also, when you are in trace mode, my son became frustrated because at times, when he attempted to trace a letter, he pressed one of the navigational buttons by mistake, which switched him to a different letter.  I don’t know exactly how to improve upon this, and it may have been the way he was holding the iPad.  One item that I found somewhat humorous was the words that were sometimes chosen to represent a given letter.  Maybe I am not as refined as I should be (maybe I need to read more books on my iPad), but when I think of the letter “F”, I think of “Flag”, or “Firetruck” – not Film Noir. I still chuckle at that one!

But overall, I found this to be a really solid app, and I highly recommend giving it a try.  $1.99 perhaps is a little pricey, but with a few refinements, I think that price would likely be well worth it.  Kudos to that team of semi-domesticated orangutans!

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I’m guilty of this as much as anyone – taking photos of my food to share with friends on Facebook or Twitter.  In fact, my first photo of 2010 was on January 1st of two biscuits and a piece of bacon on a plate simulating a smiley face.  The team at Foodspotting describe their app as a visual guide to good food and where to find it.  It answers the question “What’s good to eat around here?”

Foodspotting allows you to take a photo of your food and uses your phone’s GPS so that you can tag where you’re eating it.  After taking the photo you can choose to share it with other foodspotters or your Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare friends automatically.  Others viewing your photos can then “Nom” them if they’ve tried something you posted and loved it.  Whenever someone compliments, wants, or noms a food that you have spotted you will earn tips.

Overall, I think that Foodspotting is not only a great app for sharing my foodie photos, but also for those days that i’m traveling.  Usually when I’m traveling to a new place, I have no idea where to go and it’s nice to see a picture of the food instead of just an address and rating.  The app is free and is currently available in the iTunes app store.  According to the website there is an Android version in the works, but until then they have a pretty snazzy web app to go along with it.

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The guys from Zurb just launched a free version of notableapp.com called Bounce App.

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Until recently I had no clue what tilt-shift photography was. It seems to be a very popular trend recently as I’ve seen several tutorials pop-up on how to accomplish the technique using software. Little did I know it’s actually a special macro lens that allows you to literally “tilt” the lens to distort the focus. But that’s an article for a different site altogether. We’re here to review two iPhone apps that fake this technique, so let’s get to it.

TiltShift By imimux

We’ll start with the basics, which is about all your going to get from this app. You can take your own pictures or load images in from your Photo Albums, and save your images when your finished tweaking them. No emailing them, no in-app sharing.

On to the tools.TiltGen does have some nice “extra” options like two different blur types “Gauss” and “Lens”, and a “bloom” feature that can give your night shots that Bokeh effect, which TiltShiftGen doesn’t have. Both apps have radial and linear blurs, saturation, brightness and contrast.

TiltShift lets you chose between visual guides so you can actually see where your blurring is fading off at which can come in handy on the small screen.

Both apps also allow you to tilt, and resize your blur area via multi-touch and pinching, although I did notice a fairly significant delay between update with TiltShift each time I made adjustments to my blur area, and all of the different tools are very sensitive so dialing in an exact setting takes a bit of getting used to.

At $0.99, it’s a good buy, and if you absolutely must have the bokeh effect, then TiltGen is the way to go. As you can see from the before and after below, you can get some pretty impressive effects.

BEFORE & AFTER IMAGES FOR TILTGEN

click for large image

TiltShiftGen by Art&Mobile

You know how sometimes you get a feeling an app is going to be good simply based on the icon? (I’m not suggesting you actually do this) Well, TiltShiftGen gave me that feeling, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least!

Right away I notice TiltShiftGen’s UI. Very Apple-like. It doesn’t look like a native iPhone UI, but it’s enough that right away makes it feel familiar. Very clean, large buttons for my fat fingers, and even the pixel font used is very readable. I think it’s ok to stray from looking completely like the iPhone UI, but that’s something I didn’t like about TiltShift. It was too far from what most people are used to and took some time to get comfortable with.

TiltShiftGen has the glossy menus at the bottom where they should be, and even though they took a sub-menu approach, it’s still very intuitive where you are with the arrow pointing down to the parent menu selection. With TiltShift, all the menus were at the top which just didn’t feel right.

As we move into the settings I am very happy to see that I can post my creations to Twitter for everyone to ignore, I mean bask in my awesomeness! And I can do so using twitpic, twitgoo, or yfrog.

Diving a little deeper into the settings I see, “Communities” with Flickr, Facebook, and BigCanvas PhotoShare. At first I thought I was going to be able to post directly to these from the app, but alas I was wrong. It simply opens Safari and takes you to these sites for you to do your own manual posting.

I don’t understand why these are even in here. It’s very misleading and unless Art&Mobile is planning on adding in-app Facebook, and Flickr posting as a feature, I suggest they remove it. It’s unnecessary and could cause someone to write bad things about it. ;)

Other settings include, “Resolution” where you can change your size from 1200×1600, native to the 2.0 MP camera, all the way down to 320×427. Great for posting your Tweets and not having to send such a large file. There’s also the “Shake for Reset” and “Autoload Image” which you can turn on and off as you please. All in all a nice set of features.

Now onto the actual tilt-shift part of TiltShiftGen. Just like TiltShift, it has Radial and Linear Blurs, Saturation, Brightness and Contrast. One thing this app had that TiltShift didn’t is Vignetting. I think this feature is more valuable than the bloom effect of TiltShift. It really puts a “polish” on the end result and used correctly enhances the tilt-shift effect. The controls were very responsive and I was able to quickly get to the desired result as the image updated fairly fast and I didn’t have to continuously minimize the controls each time I wanted to see what changes I was making.

As we mentioned before, TiltShiftGen has the ability to post to Twitter and save it to your Gallery, but also lets you sent it by email, another feature lacking from TiltShift. It’s not crucial. You can always mail it from your Gallery the old fashioned way. However, reducing the number of steps to accomplish something you’re probably going to want to do anyway, is an added benefit.

Also weighing in at $0.99 TiltShiftGen is another great buy.

BEFORE & AFTER IMAGES

click for large image

Summary

TiltShift may have more tools, but TiltShiftGen wins this hands down with features alone. The UI is superior, the controls are more responsive and really there’s just no comparison. If Art&Mobile add Facebook and Flickr API implementation, this app would be over the top!

Photo by @dandenny

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Yes, But This One Goes To Eleven

If you’re developing an application for the masses, there are several things to consider when road-mapping it’s functionality and features.

It’s a common mindset to think you have to offer more than your competitors in order to be better. People want more right? Wrong. People (most of them) don’t know what they want. Psychologist and Author of The Paradox of Choice says that people, confronted with a large pool of options will be less satisfied with a decision. The more options there are, the higher their expectation. So even if they have made the best possible choice, their satisfaction level has by default, dropped.

We can apply this same rationale to our application design at an early stage. We’re not talking about eliminating core functionality, or even dropping the “bells and whistles” but taking a step back and asking whether or not the, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” is worth the added complexity to what the end user is going to actually use.

Too Many Chefs In The Kitchen

Another reason your application will die a fiery death is that most of us (designers and developers) need approvals. More often than not these approvals come from people who are either ignorant, afraid, or stubborn. Ignorant of what’s been proven or possible, afraid of failure or too stubborn to think that there might be someone who knows more than them. I’m sure most of you are thinking of someone right now aren’t you?

If you are one of said chefs, and you aren’t open to listening to and considering input from your peers, your product is doomed to fail and my suggestion to you is to either open your mind, or find a new profession. Perhaps a prison warden or a S&M phone sex operator. That way you either have a captive audience that has no choice but to do what you say, or you have people paying you to belittle them.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

Some of us have the luxury of not being burdened by deadlines. However a vast majority are perpetually cognizant of launch dates. Sometimes these time frames are so tight, that we are forced to cut corners. These sacrifices can range from clean coding, UI design and even usability testing. We’re not saying that we can’t iterate after the fact, but first impressions are crucial and a bad initial experience can crush even the most brilliant project.

Conclusion

The next time you end up at one of these roadblocks, consider the actions you’re taking to remedy the situation? If all you are doing is complaining about the hurdles, to see the failure you need look no further than a mirror.

We are hard-coded with the desire to do the best we can. No one sets out to fail. We need to continually educate ourselves with facts and information to consider success, but even then there is no guarantee.

There’s nothing wrong with launching a great product that can get better. By taking careful consideration to avoid these potential pitfalls, we bring ourselves one step closer to making sure your next app doesn’t fail.

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Start the New year off with your own brand new shiny Google Wave account. We have 10 invites to share, and since Wave was one of the most talked about Apps in 2009 what a better way to ring in 2010 than with a Giveaway.

Just comment on this post with your new years resolution is going to be. We will choose 10 random comments and the winners will be picked Friday, January 8th, 2010.

I love it when everyone’s a winner!!!

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We have been using patterns to solve problems for a long time. Generally people (in our industry) would define a pattern similar to this definition found on wikipedia

In software engineering, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.

Are we pulling the emergency brake on innovation when we resort to using a pattern just because it’s been used successfully before? Henry Ford said, “I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.” Mr. Ford has actually said a lot of inspiring things in regards to innovation.

Sure. There is the usability argument that if people aren’t familiar with it they will shy away. People like the cozy and fuzzy and tend to migrate towards what they are comfortable with, so there are considerations to be taken. But if your innovation breeds experience, people will use it.

Patterns are a great to use as inspiration and to see what has and can be done, but they are not the holy grail and by definition, using them is not being innovative. There are times to use them as described but I would take them with a grain of salt. Look past what has already been done and find a better way. Maybe your innovation will be the next pattern.

A FEW PATTERN RESOURCES

ui-patterns.com/

uipatternfactory.com

quince.infragistics.com/UX-Design-Patterns.aspx

developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns

uidesignpatterns.org/designPatterns

patterntap.com

Agree? Disagree?

We would love to hear your thoughts!