It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game or a productivity app, free or paid, the typical mobile app is dumped like a cheerleader after prom night. Most are all but abandoned within a month or two, which means they’re either ill-conceived, poorly designed, or both. It’s especially sad when you consider how hard it is to get your app onto someone’s phone in the first place. With a million apps in the iTunes store competing for the same real estate, it’s tough to get yours discovered, much less downloaded.

Every developer wants to be one of the lucky few who break through, but they should also want to make their apps sticky. So what does it take buck the curve? To answer this, it’s important to look at the ways mobile apps are used.

I organize mobile app usage scenarios into concepts I’m going to call the 3 Cs, and the more of them that factor in to an app, the stickier it is.

Continuity

These are apps that keep you connected to things you can’t stand to be away from. The great grandfather in this category is mobile email, which is what made Blackberry into Crackberry. Newer, sexier examples are Facebook (iTunes store link), Twitter and any other app for accessing time-sensitive content (NetNewsWire, Sportacular). The common thread is freshness – a steady stream of new content. Push alerts are key to Continuity apps, since they tell users when there’s something new to see.

Context

Mobile devices and ubiquitous 3G and GPS created whole categories of apps built around the here and now. Location and presence. If you find yourself wandering around a city block in search of a public restroom, you can check SitOrSquat. Hungry? fire up Yelp, or Foodspotting. These apps keep you coming back because of their contextual relevance and utility. Yelp’s iPhone app has become my de facto Yellow Pages to the half-mile radius.

Capacity

Modern culture has killed our appetite for idleness. We’re uncomfortable with silence. When we have some extra capacity – for lack of a better alliterative term – we fill it as quickly as we can. Mobile apps are ideal for this, especially almost any kind of game. As far as stickiness goes, though, this is the weakest of the 3 Cs. Most games lose their appeal after a month or two, and there are certainly a lot of games represented in the Pinch Media curve.

The stickiest apps are the ones that span more than one of these concepts. Foursquare, for example, covers all three. There’s Continuity in the need to know where your friends are, Context in the location features, Capacity in the gamelike mechanics around acquiring status and collecting various rewards.

Mobile video apps make up another category that spans several of the Cs. People watch short-form videos during idle moments – while riding the bus to work or waiting in line for the ATM – which is another way of saying people use them when they have some extra Capacity. Kyte (my current employer) makes it easy to distribute video content to mobile devices, which enables publishers to keep it fresh, which in turn means Kyte-powered video apps check the box for Continuity. The Kyte Mobile App Frameworks take Continuity further with turnkey support for integrated Twitter updates and RSS feeds, giving brands and publishers a multi-dimensional engagement opportunity.

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His answer: “Google Maps.”

With a fisheye lens, he took pictures from every angle, to be “stitched together” later for what I can only guess will be a kind of Google Maps twist on Amazon’s “search inside this book.” Maybe this is some kind of payback for Yelp’s recent cold feet at the marriage altar. You don’t jilt the Google.

In other news from our robot overlords, a Finn Labs van and a Google Street View car captured pictures of each other yesterday:

So, don’t be surprised if someone from Google knocks on your door and tells you he’s there to take pictures of your bathroom. After that, maybe Google Maps of your internal organs?

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A vague agenda isn’t good enough. It’s a waste of everyone’s time. Know exactly what you want to accomplish, and know exactly who needs to be there and why. Exception: if you haven’t had a 1:1 conversation with your boss or a particular underling in weeks, then you should set aside 30 minutes to do so. Agenda or not.

Standing Meetings are evil.

Are you meeting every day or every week just to see if there’s something to meet about? Are you a manager who created a standing meeting in order to keep tabs on details you don’t actually need to care about? Is the agenda vague, old, or nonexistent? Exception: Standing meetings that take up 10 minutes or less, with everyone literally standing, might actually be fruitful. Also, standing 1:1 meetings with boss/underling (see above) are a good idea, but probably don’t need to happen more than twice a month.

Two-hour meetings are evil.

For that matter, one hour meetings are evil. I’ve rarely been in a two-hour or even one-hour meeting where more than 20% of the discussion was relevant to me. Of course, I’m not a CEO. if I was, then I suppose all company business would be relevant to me. Still, if I was a CEO, I don’t think I’d want my people wasting 80% of two hours in a meeting just sitting there because the stuff their colleagues are saying is relevant to me. Exception: “Working” meetings (e.g. whiteboard sessions) where momentum is carrying things along, and the participants are still energized.

Midday meetings are evil.

It’s hard enough to get into a rhythm with all the unscheduled interruptions that occur throughout the day, but it’s hard to even try to get into a rhythm when you know you’re going to have to stop right before lunch anyway. Meetings should happen at either the very beginning or the very end of the day. Exception: Lunch meetings. You’re going to stop and eat anyway, so why not get something done? On the other hand, a pause for food should also be a pause for sanity.

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New since the last round…

Evernote: I once called this the best free application there is, and I’ll stand by that. I use it for everything imaginable. I take snapshots of whiteboards at work and save them in Evernote, and they become searchable. I use the iPhone app on the bus to quickly jot down the little ideas and inspirations I have. I do the same while driving, except I use the voice note feature. I forward useful emails – or snippets of emails – from local mailing lists like Urban Daddy and K & L Wines to my Evernote email alias. And lots lots more. I can’t believe all of this costs me nothing.

Dropbox: I work with a user experience designer who’s based in Israel and a development team based in Romania, and Dropbox has become absolutely essential to me. I keep all my current projects in a Dropbox folder on my Mac, which looks and behaves like any other local folder except that it syncs with a folder on the Dropbox website, plus a folder on my Israeli colleague’s computer, and one on my home computer, one on my iPhone, etc. So I’ll work on a file during my workday, and – with the time difference – my colleague in Israel takes over after I leave for the day. We can do this without changing our normal way of working.

Things: A basic to-do list app for Mac (desktop) and iPhone. I haven’t found the perfect to-do list manager yet – they’re either over-engineered or overly simplistic – but Things is pretty good.

Instapaper: One of those ideas that’s so simple, it’s amazing that no one did it before. Then again, its utility is very narrow and specific. I use it like this: I read my twitters on the bus ride to work, over a spotty 3G connection. Within any given tweet I might see a link to something that sounds interesting. I usually don’t want to read web pages on the bus, on my phone because of the slow connection, and also because I want to get through a day’s worth of my friends’ tweets in 40 minutes. So I just send the interesting links to Instapaper where they wait for me to read them later.

Twitter: I kept my distance from Twitter for a while and dismissed it as something that seemed trival, noisy and pointless. I was wrong, and I admit it.

Facebook: I’ve changed my tune about Facebook too. Now that no one seems to “poke” me much anymore, and I’m not constantly being challenged to quizzes, I find myself spending a lot more time on Facebook. I use it mainly for the news feed – to stay connected with friends.

Still awesome…

Google: I use Google for pretty much everything now it seems. Just today, we were ordering prints of some photos from Shutterfly Smug Mug, and we had a choice of matte, glossy and something called “lustre.” Unable to find a definition on the Shutterfly website, my wife asked me, “What’s ‘lustre?’” So I Googled ‘matte vs. glossy vs. lustre’ and immediately found the answer in the first search result. If a piece of information exists, then you can be pretty sure that someone has put it on a website somewhere, and Google can take you right to it. That is all.

Google Groups: This was essential during our wedding planning last year. The members of our group included me, my wife (then fiancee) and a couple of family members who were helping us with the planning. Whenever one of us would email one of our vendors, we would CC our Google Group’s email alias (groupname@googlegroups.com), and everyone in the group would receive a copy of the email. More importantly, the whole thread was recorded and available to all of us on the web.

G Reader: Blogs are supposedly on their way out (I don’t see it), but G Reader is still a big part of my daily web travels.

Delicious: I use Twitter and G Reader to discover things. I send the good things to Instapaper, which is kind of like short term memory. Delicious, then, is like long term memory. If something seems good enough that I think I might want to refer back to it a year from now, or share it with someone down the road, then I save it as a Delicious bookmark.

Wordpress: It’s just an amazing blogging platform. This year I customized a new theme. I also added Facebook Connect login, plus social sharing (at the bottom of each post), related posts (in my RSS feed only), Google Sitemaps support, and more. Each of these things took me about 10 minutes, thanks to the community of Wordpress devotees out there making the platform better and better every day.

Yahoo Pipes: I use it mostly to aggregate and filter RSS feeds, which I can then consume or republish. Check out my Bay Area food events Twitter feed to see an example: FoodFeed SF. It’s made up of a dozen or so RSS feeds, aggregated and filtered (to remove duplicates and irrelevant posts) then sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed.

Plaxo: I use it to keep my local address book and calendars synced with Gmail and my iPhone. Love it.

Pandora: Great music a click away, and the iPhone app is awesome too. I hook it up to my stereo and rock out. Also a great place to discover new artists.

Yelp: I rarely contribute anymore, but I still use Yelp all the time – especially the iPhone app. It’s effectively my Yellow Pages to San Francisco. I can find things near me, read reviews and then call businesses with one click.

Standing by…

Foursquare: I love the idea of Foursquare, but I haven’t carved out the time to start using it. I’ve been known to dis it and dismiss it like I once did with Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t want to eat my words again, so I’ll just say it hasn’t found its place in my digital life yet.

Also, tumblr, posterous, ommwriter

Awesome but not for me…

12 Seconds: I’m using this as an example, but I could just as easily use Ustream, Qik, Blip, YouTube or even my own employer – Kyte. Online video has arrived, and there are a lot of amazing tools out there. The mobile apps are especially exciting to me. I’m just not really a video guy. I don’t like to talk into a webcam or see myself on the screen. Just too introverted I guess.

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So, without further ado, did you know that George Lucas approached David Lynch about directing Return of the Jedi? This video is making the rounds today, unsurprisingly…

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Once I verified the specs, I started making my design templates for the Droid in Omnigraffle, and I ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the scale of my document to get the right amount of stuff on the screen. I was struck by how different everything had to be compared to the templates I use to design for other devices. In fact, each of my device-specific templates uses a different scale.

This seems strange when you consider that the devices are all roughly the same size, physically:

I was suddenly curious, so I decided to see what things would look like if I scaled the various devices as if the pixel densities of their respective screens were equal, and everything else was relative to that (actual pixel density of each device is noted in the image below):

As you can see, when you adjust for pixel density, the Droid is practically a tablet compared to the iPhone.

To better illustrate the difference, here are the two images with one overlaid on the other:

I hear designers talk a lot about the differences in capabilities and design vocabularies across the range of mobile devices, but variations in screen resolutions are another challenge designers have to confront in the mobile world. It’s especially important with touch screen devices, since the right target size for a user’s finger tap is a physical question more than a matter of pixels. Apple’s guideline for buttons is a height of 48 pixels for example, but the same physical height on the Nokia N97 measures about 58 pixels.

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What the hell is wrong with Nokia? It’s as if they got together as a company, identified all they ways their software could suck, and then aimed for the bottom.

I’ve been using some of the latest Nokia handsets at work for a few weeks now. The N97, for example, is awesome on paper. Big, high-resolution touch-screen display. Decent amount of memory, power, battery life. 5 megapixel camera – with a flash even. In person, Nokia’s handsets are still nicely styled – a good size, weight and form factor. But man oh man, the user experience of these devices has me shaking my head every time I try to do anything.

The touch screen doesn’t really work. The phone prompts me 50 times every time I need a network connection. And take today. I fired up my N97 Mini and it prompted me, “Do you want to check for software updates?”

Sure, I thought, and tapped the on-screen button to continue.

Then a dialog: “There’s an important software update for your phone.”

Cool. Go on… [tap].

A message. “Go to http://www.nokia.com/softwareupdate in your browser”

Wait, a message? I can’t just download and install the update using my phone?

OK, that seems dumb, but I fire up the browser and struggle my way through typing out the URL. Which takes me to a web page (not a mobile web page) that has a horizontal scrolling iframe containing all the Nokia handsets. I’m supposed to find my handset model, but I can’t operate the scrollbar/iframe using my N97.

Don’t ask me why I even bother pressing forward at this point, but eventually I find a search box, and I enter “N97 Mini” which brings up an image of my phone.

I click on the image, and I see the following message:

Nokia Software Updater can be used with most Nokia devices listed above and need only be downloaded once.

Requires: Windows Vista or XP, USB cable to connect your device to your PC.

Then a button to download a 23 MB .exe file.

WTF? I have to use a special app installed on a Windows machine (I’m a Mac user) to update the software on my phone? You couldn’t have told me about five steps earlier in this process?

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The Kindle has virtues for sure. It seems like a great way to take a lot of books on vacation. It saves paper and therefore trees. On net, it’s a green device, even when you factor in the materials and manufacturing.

Having said that, there are some rational, non-prejudicial reasons to dislike it…

It’s ugly. To me, the Kindle already looks like a cool gadget from ten years ago – like those candy-colored iMacs from 1998. And the display makes everything look like you’re seeing it through the window of a Greyhound bus.

Typography. I’m a bit of a font geek, but I think it should bother everyone that the Kindle uses one font for everything. I hear the Kindle DX has native PDF support, which I assume includes fonts, but I also assume it – like the Kindle 2 – uses Monotype Caecilia for everything else. It’s hard to imagine reading the New York Times in such a robotic looking typeface, but the bigger issue is that fonts are carefully chosen. They signal something about the contents of a work, just as body language and clothing signal something about a person. You can tell just from the typography of a movie poster, for example, whether a film is serious, funny or frightening. Fonts are like the clothing of a written work.

No backlighting. Really? This is a battery-powered device, but if you want to read in bed without bothering your partner you need to clip a book light onto it? When I learned this about the Kindle I could not believe it.

No pictures… or terrible pictures. I hear the DX has made some improvements here over the Kindle 2, but in any case the device doesn’t do color, so things like infographics and many kinds of illustrations are simply rendered useless.

You can’t lend or borrow. I love the public library, and I love having my own library. One of the things I love about having books in my house is being able to give them away to people. By the same token, I love it when a friend hands me a dog-eared paperback she just finished and says, “you have to read this.”

Yep. I’m happy with the ancient, tree-killing version.

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There’s also an opportunity cost, since the install itself took about an hour, and then I had to spend several more hours troubleshooting and fine-tuning to get everything to work satisfactorily.

So, here’s my breakdown…

Right now I’m running trial versions of the latest FontExplorer (which also doesn’t work with Snow Leopard) and Parallels 4 (which does). I may switch to FontAgent Pro and VMware, but this wouldn’t change my final price by much.

I’m not thrilled about all this, and I’m not going to upgrade my other Mac for now.

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