Note that I’ve only verified these behaviors on iOS. And as the tagging suggests, it probably is meant to only work in iOS. Anyone know whether the same behavior can be achieved on Android devices?

Hiding the Safari browser chrome and address bar

This screenshot shows the runtime experience of Forecast.io on an iPhone. Note that there is no browser chrome or address bar to be seen!

How is this done? Here’s the meta tag:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

That’s all there is to it!

Displaying a custom icon in the app drawer

The next screenshot shows what you see after running Forecast.io, then returning to your home screen, then double-clicking on your home screen button to reveal the app drawer. There’s a Forecast.io app icon there!

And here’s how that’s done:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="http://forecast.io/images/icons/54.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="http://forecast.io/images/icons/72.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="http://forecast.io/images/icons/114.png">
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="144x144" href="http://forecast.io/images/icons/144.png">

Note the support for both regular and Retina home screen icons.

So with these two little snippets of code placed before your page’s </head> tag, you can achieve the same native-like user experience with a web app on an iOS device as Forecast.io.

The only deal is, there are some intriguing mysteries about how all of the magic is done. I’d love to be able to design my own web app like this, especially one that can be installed on my iPhone’s home screen and have its own app icon appear in the app drawer during runtime (instead of Safari’s icon). Just like a native iOS app.

Until I understand this and more, I’ll have to satisfy my curiosity about Forecast.io by continuing to Google it daily and compile the articles I find here.

Happy reading, and enjoy Forecast.io.

• Forecast.io: The best weather app for iPhone isn’t an app at all. iSource, May 1, 2013.
• Forecast.io is a fantastic service and a fantastic Web app. TechHive, April 22, 2013
• Forecast.io is a beautiful weather app for any Web device. CNET, March 29, 2013
• Forecast.io is a weather app worth gushing over. No, seriously. ITWorld, March 28, 2013.
• Review of Dark Sky’s new forecast tool, Forecast.io. Washington Post, March 27, 2013.
• Forecast.io — When Good Design Meets Scarily Accurate Data. Beautiful Pixels, March 27, 2013.
• Forecast.io Delivers a Useful Animated Weather Report for Your Location, All On One Page. Lifehacker, March 27, 2013.
• Meet Forecast, The Web App That Has Web App Developers Drooling. TechCrunch, March 26, 2013.

Whether you are new to web or app design and development, or have been doing it for years, you probably know the drill pretty well already. You know what I mean— the established, and very well-intentioned best practices that we list and make sure they are checked off successfully as we are designing, developing, and launching a new site or app:

• Is it accessible?
• Does it comply with the client’s branding and design guidelines?
• Does it look great, and provide a simple and delightful user experience?
• Was it written with good web or mobile content strategy guiding it?
• Is the CSS, HTML, Javascript, or other code modern and standards-compliant?
• If a web site, is it an adaptive design for supporting multiple screen sizes?
• Has the site or app passed a usability evaluation?
• Is analytic code in the right places for tracking user behavior?
• Is there social media integration and a strategy to ensure that people will easily find and engage with the site or app?
• Are there launch and maintenance plans so that the site or app goes live on time and does not quickly “go stale” after it is released?

These ten points and more should be pretty familiar to designers and developers. They’re the subjects of many outstanding books and conference sessions and, for goodness sakes, we can always get better at doing them, right?

Yet there’s a problem: this isn’t enough. A significant gap can remain between creative and technical success and true organizational success. This gap is filled by product management.

In today’s new landscape of increasingly rapid web and app development cycles, it’s not enough to focus on project-level attributes alone for determining success.

Furthermore, it never really was enough. Success metrics for projects do not completely translate into success metrics for organizations and businesses. For one simple reason:

Most organizations are not in the business of operating web sites and apps.

So what do most organizations and businesses do? What are they good at? What do they care about?

That’s pretty simple, too:

Organizations are in the business of selling products.

Now you might pause for a moment and argue that all organizations are not in the business of selling products, and I’ll cover that in more detail later. But in short, I’ll disagree with you here and briefly state that you’re incorrect if you think that all organizations and businesses don’t sell things. Actually, the entire purpose of running any organization or business is selling a product. You just need to have a broader definition of what selling means, and also what products really are. Once you have that understanding, it all begins to make sense.

So what does this mean for designers and developers? What it means is that we need to broaden our measures of success. We need to add more criteria to our list that go beyond user experience design, best practices in coding, content strategy, social media strategy, and everything else that we love to think about, talk about, and implement.

Our web sites and mobile apps need product management criteria, too.

These additional criteria end up being much more specific to individual organizations and products, but should look something like this:

• What is your web site or mobile app designed to enable customers to accomplish? In other words, what are the goals?
• Do those goals involve delivering content, or do they also involve enabling transactions?
• How will you verify that delivery and transactions are happening successfully?
• Who in the organization is interested in knowing the data about delivery and transactions?
• How will you communicate the data to them, and how often?
• How do you know that they are the right people to care about customer behavior? Do others in the organization need to know, too?
• What are the measures of success for the delivery or transactions?
• Do the project’s designers and developers understand these measures of success?
• Does the organization’s leadership understand the creative and technical options for achieving that success?
• Who’s managing all of this when everyone is already really busy with their design, development, and management work?

That phone in your pocket…becomes just a part of your life. It’s something you use, something you rely on. And then completely forget about. And in its own way, that’s actually kind of mind-blowing.

I really like these two Wired reviews of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5. They are completely spot on.

Since the launch of the original iPhone, we have been conditioned to be wowed by Apple and its competitors when it comes to smartphone innovations. Finally phones didn’t suck… and could even be awesome. Exciting news indeed!

Then this expectation was bolstered further by our somewhat surprising love affair with the iPad and other tablets. Suddenly we were also getting excited about products that we didn’t even need. Yet suddenly we did, or at least felt that we did.

But like everything cool and innovative, it eventually becomes more everyday and ho-hum. But as these reviews point out, that’s rather impressive in itself. The fact that these devices have become so ubiquitous and “normal” means that they are impacting us more and more, and as they become cheaper they will become even more common.

Because let’s face it, when is the last time you got excited about a new pencil, piece of paper, car, or garment? Sure, from time to time there’s new ideas in these and other product areas, too. But as products become everyday products, they cease to amaze us as much, even as they are continually enhanced but often in smaller, more incremental ways. And this is okay. So let’s stop expecting Apple and others to impress us as much with mobile devices as they used to. At least with glowing rectangles of various sizes.

Because we can be sure that something else exciting is still around the corner.

Designers work with pixels, layouts, libraries and frameworks, and can have exciting, tangible results to show people when they’re done. Product managers need to step back from hands-on design and look at the bigger picture: how should an existing site or app be improved and why? How will we know if our improvements are successful? Who needs to know? And what’s the next big thing we should tackle?

This work involves a ton of design, too, but it’s design of a different sort. It’s designing moments, meetings, presentations, and influence. It’s also art, but the art of persuasion, negotiation, research, and writing. The results are also different and can take a lot longer to be visible. But it’s truly where the art and science of design intersect, as well as where design and business intersect.

I used to be suspicious of “business” and “marketing”, but now I realize that organizations — whether for-profit or otherwise — are all about business success. Because business success is all about solving problems that people have. Or as Scott Jenson puts it so well, minimizing the pain in an existing service or product. In fact, minimizing pain can be so valuable and profound that it can motivate people to do amazing things, and result in immense product satisfaction.

So thanks to my coworkers who make all of this great work possible, especially in an area that is so exciting (online higher education, and business-to-business online training and support). You’re too many to name here without risk of leaving someone out, so I’ll just thank you as a whole.

I’m also very thankful for Michael Nolan at Peachpit Press, who signed me as an author in 2009 and worked with me on two books. Those books helped me more confidently find my voice, and have led to many speaking engagements at conferences that I only dreamed about having prior to 2009. I’m also very grateful for the support of Jeffrey Zeldman, who interviewed me earlier this year and published an article of mine on A List Apart. When Jeffrey has your back, great things are bound to happen. And they have.

I’m also very honored to have been a part of some great conferences organized by Hugh Forrest, Tim Kadlec, Christopher Schmitt and Ari Stiles, Trey Mitchell, Doug Ruschman, and Jan Jursa. Thanks to all of you. Your events are outstanding and I learned so much by speaking there and interacting with the other participants.

Finally, I’m incredibly grateful for my wife and daughters. They were alternately supportive, patient, and occasionally upset about my trips this year (upset when they didn’t come along). I certainly promise to never let my travel schedule get out of control; as much as I enjoyed seeing some new places and meeting many new people, returning home was always the best part of every trip.

Best wishes to all in 2013, and thanks for reading.

Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing Steve Jobs on stage at WWDC in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, the enthusiasm was about the new iPhone 4. There was so much to learn from his presentation: the meticulous attention to detail (in both product and story), the assertion that beauty and quality are just as important as function, and the overriding belief in great technology being able to have a deep emotional impact on people.

In 2011, the honor of seeing Steve on stage again wasn’t completely apparent until this day one year ago. WWDC 2011 was his last public appearance. Yet on June 6, it was clear that Steve’s body was not doing well and his presentation was quite brief. But the fact that he was there, and still genuinely excited and happy to be talking to us despite being so ill, was a beautiful moment. And it was likely as profoundly human as everything he had ever done at the peak of his health.

Steve’s joy was our joy. We bonded with the joy we could feel from the stage because it was familiar. It was the same feeling we had when using an Apple II, a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone for the first time. Truly, Steve’s gift was much, much more then technology. It was feeling joy in beauty and possibility. This joy is what has always distinguished Apple products from their competitors.

You can copy technology and you can mimic design, but you can’t fake joy.

The problem with managers is that they’re totally disconnected from the everyday doing [that is] getting done.

She goes on to suggest a solution, that it’s a designer’s and developer’s responsibility to make sure that their managers understand and value what they do. Which is kind of odd, in a way, as she notes — if your manager hired you, they hired you to do something that they should already understand and value, right?

But that’s the paradox of being a manager, or even the paradox of a client who hires a designer or developer. Clients and managers are focused on solving business problems, while creative and technical types are focused on delivering solutions. In between is a fairly large gap.

And as Mike Monteiro notes in Design is a Job:

Don’t hope someone “gets it,” and don’t blame them if they don’t — convince them.

In other words, the gap between a manager (or a client) and the person creating the solution is an inherent gap. Even a so-called intuitive design solution is rarely intuitive from the beginning. Every new design, technique, or technology has its moment of needing some selling and explanation. Clients and managers can be smart, but they haven’t gone through the work that you have. And they can’t read your mind.

The best way to fill the gap between business needs and creative and technical solutions is product management. Perhaps product management is accomplished by a dedicated role on a team, or perhaps it is a time that is regularly set aside by someone else on the creative or technical team. Or perhaps it’s a manager’s responsibility on the business side.

Do you need to help your boss become a product manager, or do you need to expand your role to do product management work? In either case, product management is the bridge across the gap between business needs and technical solutions. Do your part to help build this bridge, and your team’s design and development work will be better for it.

A large part of my job as our company’s mobile product manager is acquiring and evaluating new devices as they hit the market. It’s critical for me to constantly evaluate how our mobile solutions perform on the hardware that our customers are using.

Today I was starting up our newest test device, a Google Nexus 7, and was pleasantly surprised when I received an email with the above offer: a $25 credit for Google Play, to be spent any way that I wished. I can use it to try apps, movies, books, or music.

The mobile ecosystem is rich and varied, so I’m impressed with Google’s gesture. It’s a gesture that goes well beyond software, hardware, design, and development: it’s a product gesture that is focused squarely on my human needs. The need to test a new device on an emerging platform and, more importantly, the need to try something new without having to spend more money. Google is reaching out and saying, “Hey, we acknowledge that this is new. We’re here to make it easier for you to give it a try.”

Great product management has companies and organizations focusing their creative and technical solutions toward fulfilling their customers’ human needs. To be successful, product management has to go well beyond great design and technical execution. As Google demonstrates, doing a great job of managing the very nicely-designed, well-built, and affordable Nexus 7 includes making it easy and stress-free to also test drive content from Google Play.

What is the equivalent of the $25 Google Play credit for your organization’s online products? It may not be a store credit, but I bet it’s something that is similarly outside the areas of UX, design, and development. It’s product management’s job to identify such opportunities to enhance user satisfaction, whether that role is a separate position or an effort that another role works into their responsibilities.