The article “will explore 10 of the key things to think about when designing your app (and planning the design process)”.  Here are the bullet points, but the good bits are the details, examples, and screenshots in the article.

1. Take A Goal-Oriented Approach To Simplify Functionality
2. Leverage What You Know To Create A Fully Personalized Experience
3. Think About The Place Of Use
4. Consider Multi-User And Multi-Device Cases
5. Don’t Do Crazy Navigation Unless It’s A Game Or One-Hit Wonder
6. Provide A Home Page
7. Beware Of Awkward Pop-Overs
8. Avoid Gratuitous Splash Screens
9. Use Gestures In Clever Ways, But Don’t Overdo It
10. Make Clear What’s Touchable, And Make It BIG

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/31/ten-things-think-about-designing-ipad-app/

Here’s a nice article describing some of the key areas of mobile UI with examples of apps that follow good design principles. They go into detail about their 7 guidelines for designing mobile interfaces:

1. Designing for Platform
2. Designing for Device
3. Designing for Experience
4. Designing for Conversion
5. Designing for Engagement and Virality
6. Designing for Usability
7. Designing for Awareness

http://www.scribd.com/doc/80489608/7-Guidelines-to-Great-Mobile-Design

Too many articles that discuss interface design fail to include examples or comparisons. Here’s a great article in UX Magazine that doesn’t make that mistake - Visual Design and Usability Yellow Brick Road.

The article describes giving the user a visual path through the website by properly using whitespace, colors, font styles, and font colors.  Best of all, the author compares a before and after design for a jewelry website.

The original website:

The author’s suggestions for a redesigned website:

I just found this cool website called Usability First that provides “valuable information about usability for anyone interested in the design of software or websites, from beginners to experts, in academia or in industry.”

An excerpt from their Cognitive Walkthroughs Section:

To determine the level of usability for a website, one or more usability experts “walk” through a set of the most typical user tasks supported by the website, one-step-at-a-time. At each step in a task procedure, the evaluator(s) asks herself the following four questions[1] about her expectations of users’ behaviors:

• Will the user try to achieve the right effect?
• Will the user notice that the correct action is available?
• Will the user associate the correct action with the effect to be achieved?
• If the correct action is performed, will the user see that progress is being made toward solution of the task?

The evaluator(s) attempts to come up with a “success story” for each step in the process. If she cannot come up with one, she instead creates a “failure story” and assesses why the user might not accomplish the task based on the interface design. These insights are then used to improve the usability of the website or application.

Here’s a great comparison showing the difference in OS fragmentation between iOS and Android - http://pxldot.com/post/18754186750/ios-ebb-and-flow.

From the article: “iOS devices have, on average, reached 10% version share 300 times faster than Android versions, 30% share 19 times faster, and 50% share 7 times faster”

Here are some awesome web charting libraries to make it easy to create nice-looking graphs and charts for your website:

• Google Charts - Free.  Polished.
• JQPlot - jQuery plotting library
• Flot - jQuery plotting library
• Highcharts JS - A JavaScript charting library that looks polished.  Free for non-commercial use, pay for commercial use.
• RaphaelJS - vector graphics library
• gRaphael - uses RaphaelJS to create “stunning charts on your website”
• Bubble Charts - bubble charts only
• D3 - data driven documents.  nice animations.

And some articles about charting

• Top 5 jQuery charting libraries
• Flot vs Google Charts on Stack Overflow here and here
• Hans Rosling’s awesome visualization video of 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

There are a ton of great looking themes at http://www.tumblr.com/themes/, but to really have full control over the theme, take a look at the Tumblr doc, Creating a custom HTML theme.

The easiest way to add ads to your iOS app and make the most money is to use a single ad aggregation network.  A few popular ones include:

• MobClix
• Smatto
• LeadBolt
• Millenium Media

Using one of the ad aggregation networks above will save you the trouble of having to add each of individual ad networks including:

• iAd
• AdMob
• Epic Marketplace
• Jumptap
• Vdopia
• AppNexus
• AdMarvel

It seems like everyone’s using background textures in their mobile apps or on their websites.  Here’s a nice article that talks about creating background textures in one my favorite Mac drawing tools, Inkscape:

http://tutorialgeek.blogspot.com/2010/11/texture-in-inkscape.html

Here’s a nice article for entrepreneurs that lays out the steps to build a startup from conceptualization to exit.  The article lists 5 steps and details each of those steps:

1. Conceptualize
2. Launch
3. Iterate
4. Scale
5. Exit

http://www.clarencewooten.com/index.php?page=5-stages-to-startup-success