Consider the iPod.  The simple hierarchical drilldown UI popularized by the iPod is well suited to the small screens and limited input options on mobile devices.

If you wanted to create an open platform for building network powered applications based on this style of UI, what would be the best markup language to use?

One possibility would be to redefine the interpretations of subsets of XHTML– perhaps nested lists with the appropriate CSS attribute could be displayed using a drilldown UI, for example.

Another, perhaps better option is to use OPML, which already has a lot of the right semantics and is considerably more constrained that XHTML.  A link node could link to another OPML document, a traditional XHTML document, or perhaps to application specific behaviors that run on the client device.

In the case of Beyond411, things like yellow page category menus and categorized plugins could be expressed very naturally as OPML hierarchical menus.

Ethan writes on the Urbanspoon blog:

We’ve just started covering two more very important cities - or depending on how you look at it, about a hundred new cities.

Urbanspoon Bay Area - from Marin in the North to San Jose in the South, Oakland in the East to San Francisco in the West, with a combined total of 13,528 restaurants.

Urbanspoon Los Angeles - including a swath of other cities stretching from San Fernando to Long Beach, with 18,833 restaurants.

Urbanspoon is a cool search engine for restaurant information and reviews, combining links to newspaper reviews and other online sources with user contributed reviews.

(The founders of Urbanspoon are good buddies of mine, as you might guess from several points of integration.)

Beyond411 v3.9 is now available for OTA Install, you can upgrade using the “About/Upgrades” menu item.  The new features are a much cleaner look and feel and the restoration of the address book integration feature in a way that should compatible across all phones.

Update: 3.91 fixes an autocompletion bug and is a recommended update.

Google Mobile recently eliminated the notice at the bottom of search results that it adapts linked pages for the user’s phone (though it’s still in the terms.) 

As I’ve written in the past, intercepting the user’s browsing session to reformat pages in this fashion has impacts in terms of privacy, functionality, and content ownership.

• Privacy: Unless users read the terms of service, users may not be aware that their session is potentially being logged by Google.
• Functionality: Some sites break after reformatting (due to cookie domain issues, for example)
• Content ownership: Advertisements and formatting on modified sites are potentially impacted or eliminated.

My objection is not to reformatting per se– obviously, Berry411 does exactly that, though only for a clearly defined and labeled set of pages.  My objection is the fact that the user has no ability to opt out of the reformatting and proxying in Google Mobile search, and that many users will be unaware of what exactly is happening.

For this reason, Google results as viewed through Berry411 now put control back in the hands of the users.  The default is not to reformat linked pages; a link at the bottom of the page allows the user to turn reformatting on and off and this setting is remembered persistently across sessions. 

(On a vaguely related note, there is one other new persistent preference available in B411 local search results– you can choose whether or not you want dialed phone numbers saved in your search history for convenient access. This option is available through the preferences link at the top of the page.)

(I confess to being distracted myself during meetings by the Blackberry, so I can’t be the one to cast the first stone.)

BerrySearch v1.0 is now available for free over-the-air download by pointing your phone at http://thebogles.com/berrysearch.jad

This version adds IMDb autocomplete and search to the Google, Wikipedia, News, Images, and Techorati Searches of previous versions. 

Other additions:

• Shortcut key sequences allow you to quickly change the search type: “g:” for Google, “i:” for IMDb, “d:” for dictionary, and so forths.
• The “Edit Settings” menu item allows you change the network connection type to BES (if your company has a BES) or Direct (for using your carrier’s APN, which you should configure as described here.) 

I would appreciate input from users on the following question: is it better for BerrySearch to exist as a separate application from Berry411, or should Berry411 be a swiss army knife that does everything?

(Much of the context specific autocomplete in BerrySearch is now supported in Berry411 as well, in a slightly more complex form. For example if you begin a search in Berry411 with “g:” for Google or “imdb:”, the appropriate style of autocomplete is used.)

Please vote in the poll on this question.

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Movie geeks will like this one– Berry411 now autocompletes over 200,000 movie titles from IMDB and links to a fully mobile-optimized version of the IMDB site. 

No custom code had to be written for IMDB reformatting, thanks to a few new advanced options in Berry411 search plugin configuration to strip images and apply the reformatting to linked pages on the same site.

Yellow pages are great for finding businesses by name or category, but if you want to find a specific product locally, sites like Yokel are a much better way to go.  Yokel lets you know exactly which local stores have a product in stock and how much it costs.

Thanks to some integration help from the good folks at Yokel, Berry411 mobile search is now able to interactively suggest helpful Yokel searches.

Suppose you’re looking for a Wii remote, for instance.  As you type wii, Berry411 will interactively suggest searches for Wii related products on Yokel (such as wii console and wii remote).

Clicking on those links take you directly to Yokel search results, including availability and prices at local stores.

In addition to a comprehensive set of product links from Yokel, Berry411 also automatically suggests other relevant plugin searches based on past searches by users. 

If you search for Happy Feet, relevant searches will be suggested using the plugins for Google Movies, IMDB, and Yokel shopping, as well as yellow pages.

These new features are available automatically to users of recent Berry411 releases (3.7 and above), no upgrade is required.

Remember the Newton? It was supposed to revolutionize handheld computing, but failed because it lacked a good way to input data; the handwriting recognition just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In the iPhone euphoria, a number of journalists seem to have forgotten that’s impossible to create a single device that is at the same time a “breakthrough internet device, revolutionary phone, and widescreen IPod.” The iPhone looks to be a fantastic device for consuming media and making calls, but profoundly limited for any activity involving text entry. Slate magazine, at least, gets it right, quoting David Pogue of the New York Times, who is one of the very few people who’ve actually been allowed to play with the thing:

At Apple events past, journalists were often invited to a room lined with a dozen or two of the products Jobs had just shown onstage, for unscripted hands-on test-drives. This time the iPhone is being kept behind glass. So, I can’t tell you whether it’ll rock my world or drive me nuts with a fatal flaw akin to my old iMac’s noisy fan. I’ll have to settle for linking to David Pogue’s one-hour test for the New York Times, and note that Pogue, a notorious Apple fan, complained, “Typing is difficult. The letter keys are just pictures on the glass screen, so of course there’s no tactile feedback.” You’ve got close to six months before you can own one, so no rush.

My suggestion: If you’re tempted by an iPhone, pay attention to how much time you spend typing on your current phone. My Blackberry is my last line of defense against marauding editors, co-workers, and my wife, the speed-thumbed executive. I’m sure an iPhone would be a better Web surfer and music player, but I worry the touchscreen keyboard won’t let me type back at everyone fast enough to survive. Also, I’ve already quit Cingular once; do I really have to sign up with them again? And unless I can install third-party applications, as I do on my Mac, I’ll surely get frustrated. I’ll have to do a shootout against the real thing in June.

The other essential limitation in the initial implementation is the fact that it only supports 2.5 EDGE, not anything faster. For a device shipping in June that would like to be able to support streaming multimedia, that will prove an important limitation, especially given the relatively small on-device storage. (Despite the fantastic screen, the iPhone has the storage capacity of a high-end Nano.)

Other important questions concern openness: will Apple lock us in to proprietary software and media formats (i.e. the iTunes store) approved by them and their carrier partner (no skype or DivX)?

As we know, Apple always comes out with a second and third generation of their devices that make you regret owning the first generation. I for one will hold on to my $500 till the next generation.

Yahoo! Go is perhaps the most graphically attractive and feature rich mobile application available today. It is also, unfortunately, unusably slow (5-10 second load and shutdown times on a modern Blackberry with EDGE, visible typing lags, 20 second driving directions times) and excessively complex for common tasks.

The beauty: Below is Yahoo’s description of the feature set and screenshots.

Yahoo Go! is the first application optimized for the “small screen” of a mobile phone that truly makes it easy and fun to access the Internet. Everything about the Yahoo! Go interface is designed to be both visually stunning and give you what you want with the fewest clicks possible.

At its core is the carousel, used to navigate intuitively among the various Yahoo! Go widgets: your own personal channels for email, local info & maps, news, sports, finance, entertainment, weather, Flickr™ photos and search.

The bloat:

The app is a 500KB download, but the real bloat is in the time and complexity to accomplish simple tasks.

Suppose you want to driving directions to a Thai restaurant in your neighborhood and have already configured Yahoo Go!.  Below are the steps and timings:

1. Launch app and wait for splash screen: 6 seconds
2. Scroll down to local search icon, alt-scroll to get over to the main pane, scroll up four times to get to text input box
3. Enter text, after clearing any previously entered text (perceptible lag while typing)
4. Wait for results: 5 seconds
5. Click Get Directions. Click submit. Wait for directions: 20 seconds
6. Click exit, click yes when asked if you’re sure you want to exit
7. Wait for exit splash screen to disappear  5 seconds

All of the delays are painfully slow, even more so on a mobile device than on a PC.

A mobile app should launch and exit instantaneously (as, for example, the Gmail mobile app does) so that it doesn’t need splash screens and exit confirmations.

Speed and simplicity are the most important features of any mobile application. 

On these critical points Yahoo failed in their initial effort.