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When you're out and about, your phone probably isn't always in front of you. It might be in your pocket or purse or on a table - perhaps with the screen off. We want to make sure you see important Tweets even when you're not looking at Twitter at the moment. To help with that, today we're launching push notifications for @mentions.

My earlier post about the mobile Text Input Field was met with quite a bit of interest. A little surprising perhaps, since it's a somewhat mundane problem area. But understandable, because its so important to get right. So, to complement it, here is an input control for bound numerical data. Multifield The little brother of the text input field is the Multi-field editor. While the Text input field is suitable for general free form text and numbers, it is not ideal for structured data like dates, time, monetary values, number ranges, etc.

Examples of rich mobile interface.

There are two interface interface elements of typical mobile user interfaces that does the heavy lifting. That is the Text Input Field and the List. I thought I'd share with you some of the usability considerations that is going into Text Input Fields at mBricks. The keypad is well suited to number entry, but ill suited to text entry. Entering text on a mobile phone is hard, and people tend to avoid it if they can. The less text input you have, the better. But you can't avoid it all together. Text input fields are suitable for plain text, numbers and passwords. For entering specific data types like date, time, number ranges etc. you should not use a text input field. Instead use Multi-field Input or a selection widget like a Calendar.

Over at mBricks my colleagues have put a lot of work into the device database (we work with WURFL data and contribute back as well as we can). I took the opportunity to take a closer look at screen size trends. The data I have covers about 400 different device models sold from 2005 to today.

News for User Interface Design, Human Computer Interface (HCI, Human Factors, & Usability from Usernomics.

I've seen many prototypes of mobile UIs that can't be built and if they could, would not be legible on a small LCD screen. So I thought I'd provide some pointers that might help those of you that is starting out. Often, people starting out prototyping mobile phone UIs get the size of the display right but the size of the font wrong. They try to stuff way too much in there, and they use a font size and font family that is not available in the phone.

some issues with gmail usability on the mobile phone

This article explores the practice of "beeping" or "missed calling" between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile's owner can pick up the call. Most beeps are requests to call back immediately, but they can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as "pick me up now" or a relational sign, such as "I'm thinking of you."

There has been a lot of huffing and puffing over limitations to iPhone 3rd party apps. Especially the "one app at a time" and "no background processes" rules. A lot of people claims that these particular restrictions does not apply to the native iPhone apps or to preferred partners that Apple lets under the tent. I would like to argue that this assumption is not correct.