Many of the restrictions around the iPhone OS are well documented and infamous. Here though, I lament the loss of a less regarded capability of open systems; the extensibility of existing applications themselves, and explore the closest alternative on the iPad: The web browser, and the web itself.

Part one of my Designing for Location series. Back in 2008 I worked for Yahoo! on Fire Eagle, in 2009 I tried to present everything I’d learned to an audience at Chromatic in San Francisco, and this is the long delayed write-up of what I know.

There is value in email, and that value is communication. Over years, service providers and publishers have taken advantage of email’s ubiquity to adapt it for push, notification and automation. Better solutions to those use cases are emerging (or already exist), so this is the time to reclaim the inbox, reduce your email throughput back to what the medium is really good for. I’ve already seen that a little bit of persistent effort can greatly increase the quality of email as a tool.

A draft set of rules for groups playing multiple, simultaneous games of Settlers of Catan, enabling trading of resources between games (and rewarding the establishment of trade routes.)