Immobile Apps

by Nick Bradbury

Many of my favorite mobile apps are immobile. I can't take them with me.

All applications should aim to work as well as possible without a network connection. This is very important, but it’s often done wrong.

As well as preserving as much functionality as possible, don’t pester the user when there’s no internet connection. Mail and Maps on the iPhone are good examples of this: they save lots of information for offline access, but put up an annoying messages about there not being a connection. Unfortunately, iOS 5’s Notification Centre did nothing about this problem.

The gold standard here is Instapaper for iOS.

(via Brent Simmons)