ReadWriteWeb

ZURB launched yet another handy design application to help anyone test Web products they're working on. This one is called Solidify. It takes care of one of the most annoying parts of building an interface: testing clickable prototypes. Solidify lets you build a working test of your design and give it to users to see if it makes sense to them. It also gives you analytics on how your testers performed.

Along with the new app, ZURB opened a new apps page showcasing all the great Web design helpers it has made, many of which we've covered on ReadWriteWeb. ZURB's tools let you make simple mockups, send images of pages for tester feedback, or collaborate on a wireframe with a team. Now, with Solidify, you can build working tests, too.

Entrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and Foodspotting as prominent examples of great apps with acclaimed UX that were rendered in native languages as opposed to HTML5. Are top developers really pushing back against HTML5 or is Scoble once again a little too deep in his fantasy world?

Google is making a concerted effort to consolidate the design principles of Android and teach developers how to make more visually appealing apps. First came a site for Android tutorials, Android 101, and last week Google announced mandatory Holo Themes for any device running Ice Cream Sandwich with access to the Android Market. Google has now announced a one-stop destination for design guidelines for developers to create beautiful apps. All signs point to Google reigning in the app ecosystem of Android, setting standards and guidelines and pushing for a more tightly controlled ecosystem. This can only mean good things for the world's most popular smartphone operating system.

COLOURlovers has announced a new sister site called Creative Market, which will allow digital designers to buy and sell assets like vector patterns, Photoshop brushes, gradients, fonts, photos and more. COLOURlovers founder Darius "Bubs" Monsef says this is the chance to "go big with our mission, which is to make design simple and accessible." Bubs wants to do for "mousemade goods" what Etsy has done for handmade goods, creating a peer-powered market for "casual creatives."

But Creative Market will also be an extensible platform. It is built on an API other sites and applications can use to integrate the store into their own services. "We're driving in-app purchases for creative content," Bubs says. Tired of leaving Photoshop, going to the browser, Googling for something you need, buying it and wrestling to install it? The COLOURlovers Creative Market will let you browse, buy and install new elements without leaving your workspace.

When it comes to UI design, Apple's iOS evolves pretty slowly. They rolled out one of the biggest enhancements to its mobile operating system this year with the launch of iOS 5. A radically redesigned notification system was the biggest visual overhaul and prior to that, there was the addition of folders in iOS 4.

Whenever the next big upgrade to iOS's look and feel may be, a few hints about what might be included can be found in one of Apple's latest hires. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student in Athens, Georgia announced that he was hired by the company as a design intern.

Throughout the year we have tracked the how developers have made design decisions, and the tools available to small-to-medium businesses for creating websites on the mobile Web. On Tuesday we wrote about a new suite from Conduit that makes it easier than ever to create dynamic websites for native platforms and the mobile Web. Yet, despite all of Conduits tools, apps and the mobile Web are in danger of falling into the trap of cookie-cutter design.

There are almost a million apps in the wild between the major platforms, with Android and iOS making up the vast majority of them. Let's be honest here: many of those apps are subpar and unimaginative. The mobile Web is not much better. Yet, there is hope. That is the subject of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Bill Gross is the man who made the technology behind the first keyword advertising systems online and has long been rumored to be aiming to challenge Twitter.

Today Gross launched a big, ambitious new social network called Chime.in. The service aims to offer the best of all the other social networks, plus a better experience for users and an advertising revenue split based on user interests. Unfortunately, the site is not good so far. UX is particularly important if Chime.In is going to create a thriving network with a revenue split. We talked to three different User Experience professionals who took a look at Chime.in and said it needs a drastic overhaul if it's going to be a contender. I think it's occasion to remember just how important and non-trivial the interface work on successful social networks has been.

The folks at Silicon Valley design firm ZURB just launched a free Web app for tablets called Axe. Axe lets anyone with a tablet provide design feedback to websites by blacking out or highlighting page elements and entering text notes. Marked-up pages can be sent along to friends or site admins with an email address.

Axe is a tablet complement to ZURB's desktop Web app Bounce. These features and more are available in ZURB's pro app, Notable.

Silicon Valley design firm ZURB has just launched a free, simple Web design tool called Spur, which lets users play with a Web page or image and think about its visual design. The app is based on a ZURB blog post called "Critique a Web Page in 30 Seconds or Less," which lays out some basic principles to evaluate the effectiveness of a Web design.

"Learning to view websites critically is an important skill to hone," writes ZURB's "fearless leader," Bryan Zmijewski. "Too many companies spend needless time arguing over details of a website before the larger picture is fully developed. This puts users, and ultimately your business, at a disadvantage because the 'big picture' is what creates the users perception of your service or website." Spur seeks to democratize these skills by helping anyone break down a Web page design to its fundamental visual elements.

It was a matter of time before a mobile development company made a framework that makes it very simple to create mobile Websites. Web2Mobile has launched a product called FiddleFly that allows companies to easily create a mobile presence with templates, themes with drag-and-drop ease.

Mobile and Web developers have been dreading it, but the cut-and-paste revolution that dominated late 1990s Web design is coming to mobile. Unlike the 1990s though, where Web pages were static digital posters, the mobile version of this evolution can at least create dynamic sites that users can interact with on their smartphones and tablets.