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.

The example test gives the user a series of actions she or he has to complete on the prototype site. The task is to add a new team member to the application. It presents a screen with the whole Dunder Mifflin Team and their various levels of admin status.

Clicking on the profiles works and opens their bios.

Not all of the interface elements in here are active, but the 'save' and 'cancel' buttons work, so you can get back to the main screen.

Remember, the test is to add a new team member, so you click the 'New Team Member +' button, and it opens a new form. When you click on the text area to add an email address, Notable just adds them in for you, showing you that you did it right.

When you save that form, you get a success message, and then Notable asks for your feedback on your experience testing the prototype.

The creator of the test gets some statistical feedback about how well users were able to perform the task, as well as the comments they left at the end.

If you build Web interfaces, ZURB offers all kinds of ways to test your ideas in the early stages. Solidify helps with one of the hardest, since building clickable prototypes is often much more trouble than it's worth. Sign up for Solidify if you want to try it out.

Scoble is often the mouthpiece for these developers. To be fair, Scoble and I have met and are friendly and I find him to be a fine individual but the classic argument against him is that he is the living personification of the edge case. He knows everybody, talks to everybody and does a respectable job of eating his own dog food. Companies and developers, with good reason, respect his opinion. But, the way he inundates himself with all the great innovations of the ecosystem, he sometimes misses the reality of development and utilization in the rest of the world.

With respect to Scoble, this HTML5 argument is hogwash.

Path won a Crunchie for best design. For those not in the know, a Crunchie is an award show for best startups, design and innovation in the tech community hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm. It is the yearly culmination of the San Francisco echo chamber and, while interesting, is not really followed by many outside of Silicon Valley. That is not to discount what Path has created. We have noted the splendid design of Path at ReadWriteWeb as well and it is truly a very well made app.

Path is an edge case scenario in the world of mobile app development. It integrates social messaging, location check-ins, photography and music recommendations into a sophisticated timeline (a "path") that is endlessly scrollable and visually appealing. Path is the quintessential native app.

It would also be impossible in HTML5.

The limitations of HTML5 at this point are that it does not allow device access (to objects like the camera and location services), scrolling is often limited and multi-layered sound is very difficult to implement. See our recent coverage of the "HTML5 Developers' Wish List" for a fuller understanding to the limitations of the spec. All developers agree that HTML5 is still a work in progress and there is great hope that the standard will be advanced to a degree in 2012 that many of the problems that inhibit mobile developers will be solved. The key concept to remember with HTML5 is that it takes the one true "killer" app, the browser, and enhances its functionality.

To say that the best mobile developers and designers are pushing back against HTML5 is outrageous. It is like saying that Web developers and designers (by far the most robust group of Internet coders) are turning their backs on the standard that is taking the browser to the next generation. This is simply not true.

Like Scoble, I also talk to top developers on a daily basis. Some of the most talented coders and designers I know are working on creating dynamic experiences in HTML5 for mobile devices. That includes developers from Sencha, appMobi, Zynga and other games makers, mobile cloud developers and third-party Facebook developers. All see HTML5 as a great opportunity and are fully embracing the challenge. Look at Facebook in particular. Nobody would suppose that its developers are not some of the tops in Silicon Valley. The company is working towards progressing HTML5 and the apps ecosystem around it with innovative approaches to what the mobile Web can do.

For me to believe that the "best mobile app designers" are pushing back against HTML5, I am going to need more examples than three edge case native apps that have very specific functions. There is so much more to the mobile Web than a pretty native app.

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.

COLOURlovers is all about giving so-called "casual creatives" better options than crappy clip art. It has been around for seven years, and Bubs says it's "a million members strong." Its core site lets people exchange color palettes and templates, and Creative Market expands the options to all kinds of digital design elements. It allows anyone who needs creative work done quickly to do the job, and it now offers a platform for digital designers to make some money.

The site has facilitated some transactions manually in the past, helping members sell patterns to MetLife and HarperCollins. Creative Market is a natural next step. "It will be super-easy for creators on COLOURlovers to get their content into the marketplace," Bubs says, "and their marketplace content will be immediately buyable within the COLOURlovers site."

Making the market available as a platform will extend its reach, but Bubs also views it as a win-win for other sites. "There's a motivation to do it in a way that's inclusive rather than exclusive," Bubs says. "I'm optimistic that we can actually partner with a lot of other sites rather than compete with them."

"Our plan is to build our marketplace on top of our own API so that it makes it really easy for other sites to plug into it." Bubs says COLOURlovers has several such partners in mind, but they aren't confirmed yet.

Creative Market is open for pre-registration by email today. If you sign up now, you'll get a $5 credit. Creators who want to be listed among the first Creative Market publishers can contact the team at hello [AT] creativemarket.com.

Do consider yourself a "casual creative?" What kinds of mousemade design do you do? Share your experiences in the comments.

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.

Cart also put together a video prototype showing dynamic icons on the iOS home screen. The redesigned icons include fluid animations and live data about recent activity from within the app. For example, rather than a static red circle showing the number of notifications, the Facebook iOS app might show what kind of notifications they are. Are they mentions? Wall posts? Messages? Friend requests? Dynamic icons can provide more context while still maintaining a fluid and simplified design.

These ideas apparently have enough merit in the eyes of the company to warrant their bringing Cart on board to help execute a few of them. It's not the first time Apple has hired people who have tinkered with their products and come up with viable ideas. The company famously hired known iOS jailbreaker Nicholas Allegra, also known as @Comex as an intern in August of this year.

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 gist of Chime.in is that it allows users to follow and discuss streams of content about particular topics. Sometimes that content comes from topic feeds, sometimes from individuals who tag updates with certain topics. Like I've tagged a bunch of mine "existential dilemmas" - and you can just follow that topic from me.

There are big previews of links, lots of images, different types of media sharing, profile pages, organization pages, communities. There's a lot. Maybe too much.

"The interface is really disruptive for easy scanning or reading," said Thomas Vander Wal, the man who coined the word Folksonomy (popular classification through tagging). "The UI needs a drastic rethink."

Vander Wal's perspective is one that many other UX professionals articulated to us independently. Upon sharing the feedback below with CEO Bill Gross, the site founder's response was as follows:

"Thanks very much for the feedback. We did do a lot of testing, but this input is very valuable, and we plan to adapt and shape the product greatly based on what we learn in the coming days, months and years. Thank you for sharing this, and we can't wait to see what people think of the product as we iterate through beta."

Unfortunately, the feedback was pretty brutal. Other tech news sites have focused on the gimmick of revenue share for ads next to content on the Chime.In pages, but that's unlikely to appeal to users (brands, sure) and the service is aiming to do much, much more than that.

"It suffers from a malady that many sites suffer from - trying to do too much," says Olivia Hayes, Senior Creative & UX Designer at Ignite Social Media.

"The most usable sites and platforms are the ones that have only a few goals for you to accomplish, and they lay them out in a very clear, hierarchal way to indicate which is the most important goal.

"In this case, there's no visual hierarchy to help the user innately understand what the goals of this site are. You shouldn't have to read the 'About' section to find out what a site does. You should be able to land on the homepage and undersand in a few moments what the site does and what action you should take first. This site has a lot going on with no clear visual hierarchy...I'm still not even sure what it does."

Below: A topic page for the Web 2.0 Summit, where Chime.in is launching. The Chime.in community manager didn't bother to change the description of the page from the description of the conference he copied and pasted in. That seems kind of lazy and inauthentic. Did I mention there's a revenue split on ads though? It's like you can be paid a few bucks for Tweeting! Isn't it about time you derived some value from this otherwise worthless medium?

Jim England, Director of User Experience at Infochimps, feels much like the others.

"Chime.in's user experience is best described as distracting and clunky.

"Individual posts are difficult to read. Unnecessarily loud visual elements such as box shadows and bold colors distract the user from the content. Actions such as reply or favorite are shown for every post - compare that to Twitter's interface which only shows actions on hover. My eyes never got a chance to 'rest' on the content; they felt overly-stimulated.

"There is also no visual consistency. For example, the 'share what interests you' box has a larger margin on the left than the right and doesn't line up with the rest of the page. Certain elements feel out of place - the 'invite your friends' box sticks out like a sore thumb. There is a notable absence of polish in the interface.

"I really like the idea of Chime.in (reminds me a bit of Friendfeed!) but unfortunately the user experience leaves much to be desired."

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

There's no way to undo - you just have to shake or press 'clear' and start over - but since this is just for making quick design notes, that's not a huge deal. Currently, the brush tools are only in black, so dark websites are kinda out of luck. It's "like a Sharpie," ZURB marketing lead Dmitry Dragilev says. "It's easy to cross things out with a Sharpie." But he adds that more colors are a future feature.

Here's a demo video of Axe in action:

Spreading The Good Word of Design

ZURB has released a handful of free Web design apps, including Spur, which illustrates some basic subconscious principles of Web design; and Verify - a side-by-side testing suite to compare potential design elements. ZURB's passion for spreading good Web design extends beyond free Web apps; it hosts an annual event called ZURBwired at which one lucky nonprofit gets a free 24-hour design party with the ZURB team.

Check out the video from this year's ZURBwired event with winner Rebekah Children's Services:

"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.

The landing page of Spur displays a toolbar to input a URL. There's also a link to flip the toolbar to upload an image instead. After clicking 'Spur it on,' the app analyzes the page or image carefully while displaying an absolutely epic animation of a cowboy meandering across a field as the sun gently sets.

When the analysis is finished, a scrollable image of the Web page appears underneath the Spur toolbar, which offers a few tools for playing with the image to assess the design. The options are grayscale, intersections, contrast, blur, mirror, rotate and zoom.

Each of these lets you test the principles outlined in the blog post in different ways, and a drop-down from each button offers more information about what this tool can teach people who are new to design. Spur also provides a URL for the image for sharing and collaborating.

It's very simple app, but it's a thought-provoking introduction to thinking about the effects of visual experiences on the Web, which we may often take for granted.

What are some websites you think are especially well (or poorly) designed? Share some examples - maybe even using Spur - in the comments.

Fehrenbacher says she started the site when a student, as a way to engage in public conversation about specific topics of interest to her. That sounds like the kind of founding story that many of the first wave of commercially viable blogs of the era can tell. The site speaks to a lucrative young readership with disposable income and now gets 15 million unique visitors each month, up from 11 million at the beginning of this year. Fehrenbacher told the story of Inhabitat's birth in depth in a long post this Spring. No acquisition price was named but given the site's growth, audience and angel fundraising, it was presumably a life-changing event for Fehrenbacher. She'll stay on as the site's manager and Editor in Chief.

"There was never really one specific 'big break' that helped me get my business off the ground," Fehrenbacher writes, "but really more a series of 'small breaks' over a long period of perseverance that added up, brick by brick, to help me build the foundations of my business."

Fehrenbacher offered some interesting advice to other students of design on the sustainability of the design school lifestyle in a notable guest post on design blog Core77 when she was a grad student at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Inhabitat included a number of related sites as well, including kid-focused Inhabitots, which launched three years ago last month, just weeks before Fehrenbacher had a child. That's some remarkable ambition.

The latest report convincingly argues that although use of mobile devices will dramatically increase, there will still be "much high-value use" on desktop PCs. "One size UI does not fit all screen sizes," the report somewhat obviously points out. The details though are worth looking at, as it shows how user experiences across devices and screen sizes will increasingly differ.

Regardless of how much value people derive from PCs compared to mobile, the reality is that most companies these days require both a website for PC viewing and one for mobile viewing. Nielsen sensibly advocates a different design for PC and mobile devices.

By mobile, he means both smartphones and tablets. Many companies may want a separate design for each, although that isn't a focus of this particular report.

Finally, Nielsen touches on 3 emerging areas of usability: TVs, very small screens (such as items with embedded RFID chips) and very large screens (such as smart buildings). According to Nielsen, each will need its own UI.

Most companies won't need to focus on designing for the 3 emerging screen types. Television is the one most likely to need attention in the near future. Currently, writes Nielsen, "designing for TV is relevant primarily for companies in the entertainment or consumer electronics industries." However he thinks that if interactive TV usability "improves substantially," then more companies will need to pay attention to that platform.

Mobile and desktop are the 2 user experiences that most companies need to worry about. The other 3 are dependent on what industry you're in. Regardless of how many screens targeted, Nielsen recommends that companies factor in these two things: create "separate and distinct UI designs for device categories that are sufficiently different" and retain the feel of a product family across devices.

Verify helps Web designers create evaluative tests for their design elements and receive audience feedback. Users can upload an image of a design, create a test for it, and then offer it to users to evaluate its effectiveness. Several kinds of tests are available, such as memory tests and A/B preference tests. Here's a working demo of a Verify test.

It's hard for small-time designers to do this kind of quality control, so Verify is especially helpful to them. We covered Verify's launch last year because the app helps designers make better Web experiences, and the new language support should expand its international audience.

Demo of Verify from Bryan Zmijewski on Vimeo.

Last week, we covered ZURB's ZURBwired event, in which the firm will team up with a lucky nonprofit to solve a design problem. Applications are now closed, and ZURB received 20 submissions. Check out their blog post to see who applied. We can't wait to hear who wins!

"This event gives the ZURB team a chance to help a nonprofit get unstuck by giving back in the best way we know how - by helping them solve problems through our time and effort. We get to stretch and grow while sharing our unique skill set for designing things for people."

Many nonprofits, especially small ones, have a lot on their plate, and building a great Web portal often takes a back seat to more immediate concerns, even though a website might be vital. It's great of ZURB to offer their creative and technical services as a donation.

Check out this video from last year's event in partnership with Resource Area For Teaching (RAFT):

The service lets designers drop image files into its web interface, then create clickable hot-spots on each page. The next page each spot links-to is chosen from a drop down menu of images uploaded and the end result is a stitched-together series of pages that can be shared publicly with a single URL and commented on. It looks really nice and is priced from free for a single small project through $75 per month for up to 25 simultaneous projects with unlimited collaborators. I saw one error in the account creation flow (which the company has now fixed), but otherwise the service appears to work well as promised.

Trying to create a free account resulted in an error message each time I tried to do so, but my account was in fact being created and I got verification emails each time I tried. (Update: This has been fixed and account creation is remarkably fast now.) Otherwise it appeared to work really well and was very fast and easy to get started with. Check out the demo video below.

UX designer Rachel Anna Lehman said this morning that she's excited to do some wireframes with InVision and then user testing of them using Silverback. That does sound like fun.

"You can do a similar thing in Fireworks, but this makes it a lot easier," mobile UX designer Brianne Baker told me after looking at the service. "The service's resources section is cool too, they offer links to various wireframe kits and UI kits all in one place. Of course it depends on your workflow, not everybody prototypes like this. But it looks pretty awesome."

A recent survey on CGarchitect.com found that almost 90% of respondents were more likely to win a competitive bid using visualizations. More than 90% said community support was easier to win with visualizations. And 50% said they saved nearly $25,000 a year by creating visualizations in-house.

Fortunately, strides in 3D technology is making in-house visualization more accessible to companies both large and small. Some firms are taking advantage of tools used for 3D animation or video games to win clients or create better work. Others are taking advantage of new 3D modeling technologies available in traditional design tools.

Ze Kun Chen, a 10-year-old in China, is using 3D modeling software to help his family's display framing business. By creating visual representations, Chen was able to help customers better understand the designs.

On the higher end, Dyer Architects won the contract for the OZ project, a new mall in Russia, through use of visualizations of the firm's ideas for the mall's lighting design. The visualizations allowed stakeholders to maintain the original intent as the project progressed.

Scott Wilson Group has taken another interesting approach to visualization. It uses software to model and demonstrate the ways that the sun's position can affect a driver's visibility. The firm then takes these insights and uses them in their infrastructure design work, and uses the visualizations to win community support for projects. Similarly, Parsons Brinckerhoff created a transportation simulator that let the public explore its designs for Doyle Drive in San Francisco years before construction was complete.

New visualization tools are are also changing the way design is taught. Yale School of Architecture, for example, is teaching students to work with the sorts of 3D design tools normally used in films and animation to create more interesting forms and textures. Mark Gage, an associate professor and assistant dean at Yale, has said that traditional modeling tools have lead architects' creations to be uniformly smooth and seamless. Newer technologies are enabling designers to create more textures.

These are all examples of how visualization technology is changing the way designers do their work, but these are just scratching the surface of what sorts of things could be done in the next few years with better augmented reality technology. One future trend to watch for is how improved efficiency in software, along with faster and cheaper hardware, change the design landscape. Earlier this year Steve Lohr wrote about how software progress is beating Moore's Law, meaning that more efficient software algorithms are enabling faster software.

What will it be possible for designs to do with commodity hardware in a few years?

Photo by svilen001

ThemeIt offers jailbreakers a selection of attractive themes which can be used within Winterboard, a popular jailbreak program for complete iPhone customization. For now, there are only paid themes available in ThemeIt, but a section devoted to free themes is arriving soon.

Meanwhile, Jay Freeman's Cydia application, the default jailbreak app store, has been updated to include a revamped theme section, too. For those of you into iPhone customization, today is a very good day.

The ability to install themes is one of the many reason people jailbreak their iPhones. Although Apple lets you update your background wallpaper and lockscreen, some want to do more. They want their phone to feel unique, to not look like everyone else's. Jailbreaking makes that possible. Using Winterboard, jailbreakers can customize nearly everything on the iPhone, from icon sets, to the iPhone's dock and even the text that displays what mobile carrier you use.

However, finding the little tweaks and add-ons for these sorts of iPhone makeovers was something of a treasure hunt using Cydia. You could pick up a widget here and and a new icon set there, but the availability of complete theme packages, where all sorts of tweaks were combined into one single download, was limited.

Some in the jailbreak design community felt there was a need to expand outside of what Cydia provided. And so there came ThemeIt.

ThemeIt Hands-On

ThemeIt's founder, a guy who goes just by "Gab" online (or "FIF7Y," as his design website is called), has been letting me test ThemeIt pre-launch on my iPhone 4. My takeaway? In a nutshell: it's great.

The store is well-built, with intuitive navigation that makes it easy to preview theme screenshots, read descriptions and manage your previous theme purchases.

At launch time, there's a healthy selection of themes available to download, some of which even go a step further than simply updating color schemes and icon sets to offer alternative user interfaces, where icon folders are laid out in curved paths alongside Android-like widgets, for example. There are others where, at first glance, it's hard to even recognize the device as an iPhone.

In short, it's a customizers' dream.

My only complaint is that many of the themes have a masculine vibe to theme, as is typical in jailbreaking circles. There's a great theme with photo widgets that I liked except for the fact that the widget in each screenshot showcased the photo of a scantily-clad woman. No thanks. I'd rather put my own photos in there - why wouldn't that be an option? Sigh.

Not Just an App, an App Store

ThemeIt isn't just an app where you can find great themes - it's an app store, with built-in checkout options for paid themes, support for promo codes, detailed item descriptions, designer bios, notification settings and more.

The process of purchasing a theme is straightforward, too. After logging in, you simply click the "buy now" button, then complete the checkout process using PayPal. You can purchase themes either via the website or within the app on your phone.

I was also able to test the promo code process with the MP2 theme built by FIF7Y himself. It was fast and painless, I'm happy to report.

Both the website and app appear to be running a little slower today than I remember, probably due to the app store's launch and the fair amount of press attention it has received. I imagine it will speed back up after the initial hype has died down.

Cydia Updates Theme Section, Too

In the meantime, Cydia has also seen a theme-related update of its own, no doubt due to the tense situation between FIF7Y and Freeman, aka "Saurik" in jailbreaking circles. (More on that here). In not so coincidental timing, Saruik updated the theme section in Cydia, noting that the revised selection will now feature bi-weekly content updates with additions provided by popular iPhone customization outlets ModMyi, Planet-iPhones and MacCiti.

Even if the change was prompted by Cydia's new competition, it's worth a look, as the themes featured in Cydia appear to be different than those found in ThemeIt. However, as a regular iPhone jailbreaker, I found that many of Cydia themes looked familiar - I had seen them before, for months and months on end. I'm looking forward to the next update, though, to see what new options will arrive.

But the end result for iPhone customizers, is a win-win. There are new themes everywhere for you to try. And if these arrivals have you reconsidering jailbreaking, you can find our most recent how-to guide here.

Note: To install ThemeIt, add http://www.themeitapp.com/repo to Cydia's sources then search for the app in Cydia.

Unfortunately, we have some bad news about that ground-breaking app: it's been killed. However, we have other exciting news that may lessen the blow.

Recognizr Dies, but TAT's Android UI's Live On

Sadly, the incredible augmented reality/facial recognition application known as Recognizr will not be launched as planned. The app was one of TAT's only consumer-facing efforts and it relied on the facial recognition algorithms from a company called Polar Rose. When Apple acquired Polar Rose in September, the move effectively killed the Android application in turn. (We noticed in August, for example, that it had missed its promised launch date.) At this point, Recognizr won't launch unless another facial recognition company comes to TAT, looking to partner.

TAT may not have crossed your radar until you read about the Recognizr app, but the company has developed a number of smartphone interfaces which you have probably already used, without even knowing it. The company is just not able to talk about those designs due to its agreements with the handset makers and carriers it works with who ship the user interfaces as their own. In fact, I discovered that one of my favorite somethings on a such-and-such device I have in my possession was actually designed by TAT! Sorry to be vague, but that's how it goes.

I was able to catch up with the company at this week's Open Mobile Summit and they gave me a glimpse of some of the designs they have in the works. Below are a few quick videos I shot of the new user interfaces in action. (You can visit TAT's homepage for more professional versions, I just used my iPhone).

Although there aren't specifics to reveal at this time, the "TAT Home" collection of 3D homescreens (you may remember seeing these around the Web earlier this year, for example, on Engadget), is shipping on some Android devices "sometime next year." The devices are on a European carrier, TAT co-founder Paul Blomdahl told me. Discussions with other device manufacturers and carriers are happening now too.

While the homescreen widgets are impressive, I'm personally more fond of the 3D contacts list and mapping application myself, but there are no official deals involving these interfaces yet. (Will someone please change that?)

Android Homescreen Widgets

As described above, these are TAT's Android homescreen replacements which include its own 3D widgets for things like Weather and music.

2D to 3D Maps

TAT has designed a mapping application which goes from 2D mode to 3D mode just by tilting the phone.

2D to 3D Contacts

This contacts application goes from 2D to 3D mode, like the maps one above does, by tilting the phone. In 3D mode, status updates, Tweets and other information hovers above a contact's name. (Sorry I filmed this vertically, video is clearly not my forté).

TAT Live Wallpapers

TAT's live wallpapers also employ the use of Android's accelerometer as you can see in the video below. When you tilt the phone, the trees sway, for example. Other elements on the screen are interactive and respond to touches.