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2010 is coming up on us faster than the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run. Taking a step back and sifting through mountains of data, we’ve compiled a list of this past years biggest contributions to our industry. So without further ado, here are…

THIS YEAR’S BIGGEST APP STORIES…

Location-Based Apps

Apple’s iPhone has opened up a whole new market for developers with location-based apps. So it’s really no surprise that 2009 gave us more than our share of these little gems from an end-user standpoint. But as developers, it’s given us an opportunity to become millionaires with the stroke of a pen. Gowalla, based in Austin, Texas is valued at nearly $30 million dollars, and when reading posts like this, where IAC CEO, Barry Diller is sitting on $2 billion (yes, that’s a b) looking for valuable web properties to purchase, we are very excited to see what the next year will bring.

User Experience

We don’t like hearing the word “trend” when it comes to User Experience as it makes it sound as if it will come and go, and UX is surely here to stay. User Experience, User-Centered Design, Interaction Design, or whatever term you prefer, 2009 helped those of us who may not have understood it’s importance, drink the proverbial kool-aid and embrace it as an early necessity when developing and designing.

In the book, “The Brand Gap” author, Marty Neumeier describes brand as, “…a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.” User Experience Design uses this same type of philosophy, and in 2009, those of us not already riding the UX train, jumped on board.

Web Fonts, CSS3 and HTML5

Fonts on the web have been a thorn in the side of web designers and developers since the early days of the web. If you wanted to use typefaces other than Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, etc., you were out of luck unless you wanted to create an image and use it in place of fonts. Then came font image replacement techniques like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) in 2005 and we’ve even seen some server-side dynamic image creation using ImageMagick in the early 2000s. In 2009 we saw a resurgence of this trend but now we are giving credit where credit is due by licensing the fonts. Sites like TypeKit and Typotheque offer these services and we hope to see a lot more sites embracing the concept.

Even though a final release still hasn’t been announced, we saw designers and developers taking advantage of CSS3 and HTML5.  Safari 4 and Chrome have the most feature support last I heard, with Firefox close behind.  The latest version of IE has a long way to go before they catch up. Most notable of the group is Safari Mobile, iPhone’s web browser, which makes iPhone App development pretty slick. When you can use CSS animations and transitions to mimic a native iPhone app and coupling that with the OpenSource PhoneGap, you can develop mobile applications that will run across multiple mobile platforms. The neat thing about using strictly browser-based technologies to develop your mobile applications (mostly iPhone) is that you can modify the browser elements of your application without having to go through Apples approval process when versioning, just update your mobile site.

1,000,000,000 Downloads

On April 23, 2009, Apple’s App Store reached 1 billion downloads, only having launched a mere nine months prior. This story could make a best of 09 list for the sheer shock value alone. But the reason it makes our list is because of Apple’s financial agreement with app developers and other potential income generating items like in-app advertising.

iPhone App developers earn 70% commission on every app sold which is really an amazing commission considering the App Store is the only place you can peddle your (iPhone) wares, and the massive amount of advertising Apple does to promote it’s store is a win-win.

In-app mobile advertising is a more slippery slope to consider. But if you’re offering your app for free, it’s certainly a revenue generating path to consider.

Social Networking

2009 saw an explosive surge of Social Networking apps, enhancements, and opportunities. From Facebook’s iPhone app and site enhancements, a gazillion Twitter apps from mobile, to browser to Adobe Air. It seemed as if there would be no end to how many ways we could share information between each other and even from one social medium to another. APIs, OpenID, OpenSocial, and OpenSource. These tools made 2009 an awesome year to be a developer.

Social Networking isn’t an app, it’s not even a technology. It’s a concept, and it dominated every aspect of our lives in 2009. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that we’re at, what Malcolm Gladwell would call, a “Tipping Point”. 2009 showed us as designers and developers that Social Networking is obviously here to stay and I can’t wait to see what 2010 will bring us.

PARTICIPATE

What did you think of our list? What do you think should have made the list? We want to hear from you!!

WANT MORE?

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Tweetdeck updated today to the beta build of 32.0. Just one of the updates Tweetdeck made is the use of lists. Like the last version when you added people to specific columns you can now add them to lists through the same interface and pop-up panel. This is a simple and efficient way to add people to specified lists or create new ones. Tweetdeck now supports Linked-In as well as Facebook and I think the term “SocialDeck” seems a bit more appropriate since they have stretched their term “Tweet” about to its limits.

Another feature that is new is the new Twitter Retweet feature. It allows you to setup your RT style as the old version (manual) or the new version (auto). You can also tell Tweetdeck if you would like to keep the new or old version as standard and not bother you with annoying updates. There are several subtle (but nice) UI changes and it looks as if they have worked out it being such a ram hog. (running three accounts and about 12 columns and humming along at 218MB) I think the update is great and adds more functionality to some other twitter API’s.

Screencaps

Get It

I only listed a few of the updates about but you should checkout the full update right here.

Site | Twitter

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Its Monday, what better day to reflect on what we missed last week. Monday is slow anyway so why not kick starting your brain with some of the best of last week. Its time for the wrap-up with some site inspiration, some random people to follow on twitter and some pertinent app content and resources.

Noteworthy Articles

Google Navigation video hands-on: you want this

We apologize for being fanish, but Google has pulled off something with its new Navigation elements in Google Maps (or is it Google Maps in a Navigation app? It’s hard to tell) that has serious ramifications for a navigation device industry used to charging money for functionality. The introduction of satellite view, a tasteful touch of street view (peep a still of your next turn, or see your destination), and of course regular stuff like spoken directions and street names…

The Droid vs. the iPhone: Let’s count the apps

In the flurry of quickie reviews that appeared overnight after Wednesday’s unveiling of Motorola’s (MOT) Droid — Google (GOOG) and Verizon’s (VZ) latest answer to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone — little has been said about how the two platforms stack up in terms of apps.

iPhone Apps That Bloggers Need

Gadget Lab’s friends at WP Beginner, a WordPress enthusiast blog, has compiled a list of 10 must-have iPhone apps for bloggers: mobile software that could help bloggers while they’re on the run, or on an everyday basis in general. The list includes a blogging app, a Twitter client, note-taking utilities and others.

WordPress for iPhone 2 now available in the App Store

We’ve just received word that WordPress for iPhone 2 is now available on the App Store. Woohoo!

A quick note about installation: WordPress for iPhone 2 is a new app, and the previous version won’t automatically update to 2.0. Installing it won’t overwrite any previous version you have installed. When you launch the new app, you’ll immediately see “Version 2.0″ at the bottom of the screen. When you’re no longer using it, you can safely remove the previous version from your device.

Inspiration

Little Pixels

Just Notes

Pickin’ Time

Weather Maps

Cellar

Delibar

Live Preview

Internode Usage Meter

Resources

Disambiguity

This blog is where I share what I’m passionate about and what’s currently got my attention in the realm of User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Information Architecture (IA), Interaction Design (IxD), and Usability.

Eddit – Icon Shop

iPhone App Site Design Trends

To compete with thousands of iPhone apps in the App Store, having a good app icon is not enough. A nicely designed website for the app is very important. A beautiful website helps to drive traffic in and also makes your app stand out from the crowd.

10 hot Growl styles to make your pop-up alerts really pop

Growl provides customizable pop-up alerts for hundreds of Mac apps, making sure you never miss an important chat message or completed download. You can use Growl to set an alert for just about anything, and you can also make Growl notifications look practically any way you want.

Twitter Followers

Seven people following us chosen every week at random.

@_mark

@MikeWRogers

@iamGarth

@enestanriover

@VM_DesigNut

@iPhone_Develop

@AJCates

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Google released a strong new feature to their arsenal called Experimental Search. What exactly is an “Experimental Search”? It’s an exploratory new feature that Google has released that you can join, provided you have a Google account (Currently you can only use one account at a time, but hopefully the application will expand to allow the use of multiple accounts, at some point,) that allow you to use some much wanted features that have been added to Google.com.

The new features that Google has allowed people to test are keyboard shortcuts, SearchWiki with sound, Accessible View, and Social Search. These are huge. I tested out keyboard shortcuts and I am absolutely floored. Why? Google.com has become a standard in my searching career. With features like “The Wonder Wheel” for blogging and searching for information, it makes it impossible to conceive of switching to another search engine. Keyboard shortcuts will allow you to google your term, hit the shortcuts, slam the enter key, and then go on with learning, or finding what you needed to, without the extra mouse movements that you needed before.

Here are the keyboard shortcuts:

• J Selects the next result.
• K Selects the previous result.
  
• O Opens the selected result.
  
• <Enter> Opens the selected result.
  
• / Puts the cursor in the search box.
  
• <Esc> Removes the cursor from the search box.

Google has raised the bar and made “googling or searching” a social activity. Another notable feature is Social Search. It will be very interesting to see where Social Search goes in the future, as there is great potential in this feature. Example: If you’re a developer and you are buddies with other developers, you can see what they search and find great resources, helpful tips, and even snippets that you can take with you to apply to other projects.

Definition of Social Search:

More easily find relevant blogs, reviews and other public content from your social circle. Sign in to Google and do a search. If there’s relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a section called “Results from people in your social circle.”

What is your social circle? It’s a combination of your Gmail chat buddies, your Gmail contacts friends, family and co-worker groups, and people you’re publicly connected to on other social sites (such as Twitter and FriendFeed). Learn more about Social Search.

Conclusion:

With Google’s recent release of Wave, the Droid launch approaching fast, rolling out experimental features, a Gmail push app for iPhone, and other features like Voice, it seems hard to think that Google wouldn’t continue to set the standard for what a search engine can do for you. Google has really put in some development time to make their products “awesome,” and most are free for anyone to try and use. I think that Google could revolutionize the search engine again with these extra features. Google has definitely made their presence felt again (as if you forgot them,) so try bingin‘ that when you get the chance.

Note: Thanks to @thadwillnotstop for the tip!

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Friday has come again and Fuel Your Apps is trying to bring some of the good things that happened this week to your attention, so you can reflect back on your rather busy week. We also want to take the time to thank our readers and Twitter followers, so 5 random app-related followers will be chosen each week and be featured on this site. This idea is not new to FUEL, as it came from a bunch of smarties over at FuelYourCreativity (which is uber-cool if you want to check it out, when you need some design ammo). We also encourage you to submit your interface and app designs to us for a weekly highlight. You can do that through our Flickr Group. OK, on to that Friday Goodness!

How to Understand Your Users with Personas

Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites.

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch.

Lower your price, lower your ratings. Lower ratings, lower social proof. Lower social proof, lower sales. That’s my theory, and I’ve got data to support it.”

The Exploded View Shirt

Originally I’d printed a small series of my WWDC shirt while I was in San Francisco, but after almost a hundred comments on my blog, and almost a thousand combined emails, twitter replies, messages, and flickr comments, I had figured out that it might be a good idea to make my shirt available for sale.

Adobe Max 2009 Videos (in case you missed it)

No matter where you are, Adobe MAX 2009 Online is your ticket to experiencing Adobe MAX 2009 on demand. Whether you joined us in Los Angeles and want to revisit your favorite sessions and keynotes or you want to catch up on everything you missed, this is where you’ll find links to the webcast keynotes and the session catalog, where you can access more than 200 sessions for instant viewing.

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky video from FOWA

[vimeo clip_id="6930037" width="600" height="375"]

Start-up Metrics that Matter by Dave McClure video from FOWA

[vimeo clip_id="6925856" width="600" height="375"]

Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter

[vimeo clip_id="6969446" width="600" height="375"]

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Now web designers and developers can join the iPhone app party without having to learn Cocoa’s Objective-C programming language. It’s true: You can write iPhone apps quickly and efficiently using your existing skills with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This book shows you how with lots of detailed examples, step-by-step instructions, and hands-on exercises.

Ryan Block on First and 20

Even though the iPhone isn’t an especially good productivity device, that’s what I tend to use it for since I refuse to carry multiple phones. So in terms of the dock, the iPod had to go; between it and the bottom row, I’ve got most of what I need to get down to business……

All you Tweetie fan boys (and girls). This one’s for you…

Of course, many of you out there are will disagree and for you, I present these two cushions as a peace offering. Covered in spicy chocolate sea salt, these pillows are 100% hand-made! Available in two versions these Tweetie for Mac or Tweetie 2 pillows can be yours for $15 a piece or $25 for a pair. Buy them here.

Apple announces In App Purchases for free App Store software

Apple has announced that developers who offer free App Store applications can now take advantage of in-app transactions — a feature that was previously allowed only for paid software. The In App Purchase feature, which was implemented in the iPhone 3.0 software update for paid applications, has now been expanded for use in free applications. Previously, some developers were forced to charge a nominal $0.99 fee for their software to have In App Purchase capabilities.

iPhone app piracy numbers show low conversion rate

image by Nick Humphries

Pinch Media added code to its Pinch Analytic API last June that allowed for the detection of jailbroken devices as well as whether an application had been pirated. Since then, the company has been monitoring the applications of developers who chose to implement the API, and the numbers have been a bit staggering thus far (hat tip to ReadWriteWeb).

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Just what everyone is waiting for! The winners of the SixCentral app giveaway. Unfortunately not everyone could win. Without further adieu here are the winners. Randomly selected in no particular order (except the order I put them in). They are highlighted and so is their site listed via twitter. (Just pretend its like 15 minutes of fame FYA edition :) )

**BONUS** Winning tweets are included!!

1. Travis Grawey • @Tgraw

I love design. I love creativity. I love my wife. Video games are cool, too. txt ‘THG’ to 50500
thgcreative.com

2. Dreamscape Media • @dreamscapeM

India’s leading web consultancy.

dreamscape.co.in

3.  Christian Collard • @Printedproof

Printing and Direct Marketing Specialist with a side of design, photo, wordpress, hockey, rock, and ranch dressing. Publish PrintedProof.com

printedproof.com

4. Philippe Thronte • @lipelip

Hi I’m a webdesigner from Belgium
lipelip.be

5. Steve Robillard • @srpsco

diggerdesignlabs.com

**I’ve got nothing. No twitter profile or site. Steve where do you reside online?**

Again congrats to all the winners! You should love SixCentral.

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As you may have read Fuel Your Apps went to Awesome Inc over the weekend for a Mini App conference. The content was amazing and learning and sharing were the key things that participants and speakers engaged in. The conference was divided into Four Tracks where you could learn General things, iPhone Beginner, iPhone Experienced or technical. While being there they encouraged popping around from session to session to engage and take as much benefit as home as possible.

Noah Kagan – Facebook @noahkagan

The conference kicked off with a Keynote from Noah Kagan who dropped some science on the people in attendance. Even though in the US all we think about is iPhone and some BlackBerry’s thrown in there 50% of the the rest of the world is on a Symbian OS phone. So there is more mobile development out in the world besides iPhone apps. Kagan talked about how he used to work at Facebook and created the Your Pimp Name apps. Kagan talked about the new “lazy web” where a user doesn’t have to update their devices they do it automatically to show their location or status. Auto location updates have caught on the most in urban markets through devices such as Boost Mobile. Noah Kagan then talked about how in the net 5 years in mobile marketing you will start to see much more GPS based advertising and has a hunch that most everyone will have a smart phone in the next 5 years.

John Soward – University of Kentucky @jpsoward

“Choosing a development strategy for your iPhone application” is what John Soward from the University of Kentucky talked about.  There are 3 different dev platforms to explore when you publish an app: Web-app, Application or Hybrid of the two. The reasons to consider are: a Native Application will have access to the GPS as well as be able to use the wonderful SDK apple has provided. However if you design a webclip or a web-app you are not able to use all the full potential of the phone or setup payment through the appstore. There are also many pitfalls to having a webapp/clip. If the user can navigate away from the intended page in any way your app will be rated NC-17 because they could navigate to bad content. This is a challenge because if you are making a kids app for an iPod Touch and its NC-17 its not going to work.

Sam Soffes – Soff.es @samsoffes

Sam talked about his Bible app he developed that has been downloaded 1.5 Million times. Sam then talked about how pricing your app is crucial to the exposure you will get. Bible is a free app and would not have the same exposure if it was a pay app. Sam instructed everyone to keep the pricepoint as low as possible to enable you to have the most users possible. “If you’re not charging for the app and it has ads in it you better have a good reason. Which usually you don’t and you should just go ahead and sell it for .99 cents. “ Sam Soffes stressed over and over the importance of reading the Human Interface Guidelines and how that is key to making a successful application.

Slides

Sam also was kind enough to put up his slides from the presentation if you wanted to hope over and check them out.

Brendan Lim – Intridea @brendanlim

Brendan closed the conference with a talk about ubiquitous mobile. Lim mentioned how one day we may be connected to everything at every moment. Our phones could be credit cards they could store your car driving preferences. Applications and social media as we know it today could be one seamless experience. Much like if you were looking at a hotel that you just booked on your computer when you left the house it would be pushed to your mobile device and you could continue looking from there.

There were several other speakers that Fuel Your Apps was unable to see because of them speaking at the same time, other speakers included

Markus Spiering – Yahoo Blueprint @spieri

Zuv Tarsi – TuneWiki @ztarsi

Brian Slick – BriTer Ideas @BrianSlick

Jake Behrens – The Oklahoma Publishing @withfoam

Justin Raney – Apax Software @jarane2

This was an awesome event put on by the team at Awesome Inc. They have an amazing collaboration space setup for people in the community to use and share in art talks, conferences, gallery shows and work! If you are in the Lexington, KY are you should make it a point to stop by. I recommend you get your calendar out and mark next years mini conference down because this one was a huge success.

Can I Have More Info?

There are pictures and more information about the Awesome Inc. Mobile Mini-Conference (@awesome_inc) on their site. Give them a follow and a big thank you for doing so much for the app community!

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The new generation Twitter client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise.

Mixero is a unique twitter client it prides itself on being able to characterize data, make it easy for you to find and use and be minimalistic when you don’t need it. Now before you get all bent out of shape about it not being Tweetdeck or Seesmic this app stands a chance. Why? It has all the features the others have. Except one. Multiple account support. However, the app hasn’t launched so we can’t dock them on that yet. Whats the good news? This app has some wicked features that are creative, fresh and functional.

Avatar Mode

This is probably one of my favorite & most innovative features I think have seen come to the twitter client spectrum. When you don’t have your twitter app up you still want to monitor it right? You just don’t want it to take up your whole screen. So what has the group at Mixero done? Just that. When you create people and groups that go into the Activelist (explained below) it hides on the righthand side of your screen with just the key avatars. It tells you if you have any tweets, if they have tweet or your search columns have updated. Why is this features amazing? Because you can continue other tasks and have this twitter client open and not be fully consumed by it.

Groups

Of course. Its a standard who wouldn’t? It however does ad some extra functionality to the normal groups feature. You can filter them by specific content. So lets say you have a group of power bloggers and you want to see if they reviewed the app Ghost yet. (hypothetical to my knowledge) You can see and it filters within that group and then  the group users tweets.

Activelist

Is a way for you to put all your I gotta keep tabs on people in one place. Search, group and individuals can be placed on this list. Why is this good? They will show up in Avatar mode and you will be able to keep fine tune track of them. This is a fresh way on the typical “groups” feature.

• Can include users, groups of users and channels.
• Shows information from all contacts, groups and channels as one timeline!
• You will be notified only about updates that are really important for you.
• Most recent updates are automatically shown on top and indicate the amount of unread messages.
• Synchronized! Your ActiveLists stay with you on any PC, mobile phone and browser.

Context

You can have multiple active lists. Why? Are you at work and only need to see people in your office? Working on a huge project and need to see people competing against your project? These are just a few uses for context. This is another brilliant idea for them to show up in Avatar mode by defining who is around in each context list.

• Create new ActiveLists and switch between them to read what is most appropriate to your current environment.
• Only get the information that is interesting for each of your locations or modes – Home, Office, Train, Most important, Buzz etc
• Synchronized!

More Features

These have just been a few notable features that I think will make this app stand out. However it has not launched yet and will be interesting to keep tabs on. There is plans for an iPhone app if you want more information check out the links below. I think this app has a great start at carving out its own niche in the twitter client realm. It has the standards and some innovative features to make it swing with the big players. Keep your eye on this app and see where it goes.

Need more Mixero?

Mixero is a multiple platform application that will be available for PC and Mac. I have tested it on a Mac but will be similar experience on a PC because it runs in adobe air.

Site | Twitter

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We have extended our FYA reach into two other Social Mediums! Why is this cool?

Flickr:

Upload screenshots of your favorite apps and show them off! Then you can tag the photo and tell what parts of the interface you love and hate. This will allow other users to “see” what is going on, on other people’s computers. There may also be some secret screenshots of apps that FYA is beta testing. Another reason to join the Flickr group is that you can now use it instead of twitpic to tweet images to twitter. What could be better?

Facebook:

Connect with the real people behind the FUEL accounts you know and love. Some sites are one dimensional and facebook actually allows you to see more images than an avatar of that person.

So go ahead give the FYA groups your membership so we can connect in other mediums.