Walt Mossberg on Steve Jobs:

He did it because he was willing to take big risks on new ideas, and not be satisfied with small innovations fed by market research. He also insisted on high quality and had the guts to leave out features others found essential and to kill technologies, like the floppy drive and the removable battery, he decided were no longer needed.

I’m often hard on Apple. But it’s because I can be: I hold them to a higher standard than their competition because it’s feasible to do so. Steve Jobs seems to have led Apple and often the whole industry through his uncanny gut instinct, willingness to take risks, and unerring attention to detail. We need more of that if we are to continue innovating.

I’m excited to announce the redesign and relaunch of TechCrunch.com, a popular tech news site with over 40 million visitors per month. I’ve been leading the project as product manager and design lead since January. For details check out my launch post over on TechCrunch.

It’s been an exciting year for the mobile Web. Adoption of HTML5 and CSS3, improved performance in mobile browsers, and an explosion of mobile app frameworks mean it’s more feasible than ever to create rich, interactive Web experiences for mobile devices. Using a wrapper like PhoneGap, you can distribute them via the native app stores for iPhone, iPad, and Android —targeting multiple platforms with a single codebase.

Or can you?

I needed a platform for Pints — a mobile app that answers answer the question, “Which beer should I order?” As someone who works in Web technologies on a daily basis I saw HTML5 & friends as an alluring option.

Pints isn’t complicated: a home screen, a few lists screens, a few forms. Its greatest complexity lies at the data level: as an iPhone app destined for San Francisco bars it can’t possibly rely on an Internet connection, so it has to keep a local copy of the beer database and sync it with the server when that’s available. HTML5 has the necessary building blocks in the form of several offline storage options; it’s just a question of writing the synchronization code.

Mobile Web developers have a plethora of frameworks to do the heavy lifting for them: animated transitions, toolbars, buttons, list views, even offline storage. Most of these are new and the landscape is shifting rapidly. I started Pints in jQTouch, then migrated to jQuery Mobile, and finally rewrote the whole app (now in private beta) in Sencha Touch. Along the way I also investigated Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile. Here’s what I found: (more…)

As long-time iPhone owners we’ve done our share of railing against AT&T. Time to put our money where our mouth is. We’ve ordered an iPhone 4 (with AT&T) and a Droid Incredible from Verizon. In 30 days we return one. Two phones enter…

We’ve had the new iPhone for three days now. Since there are plenty of full reviews elsewhere, I’ll restrict myself to a few highlights.

It’s fast. Fast, fast, fast. I cannot overemphasize how important this is. Presumably it’s a combination of the faster processor and the pseudo-multitasking, with an emphasis on the former. (I am upgrading from an iPhone 3G whose iOS4 upgrade slowed it to a crawl.)

The new screen is beautiful. It’s evolutionary, but the type of evolution that feels revolutionary because it makes such a difference. I was doing my Kindle reading on an iPad, but the crispness of text on the iPhone 4 has switched me back to it. In some ways it feels like a different technology.

The hardware is not as dramatically different from previous generations as Apple would have you believe, but nice, compact, clean-looking. It’s a little harder to pick up because of the square edges.

The best news is the signal. Reception is definitely better in San Francisco – and the Mission in particular. It’s possible to make calls in our apartment and to load data on the street, though it’s still spotty. Whether that’s the device or AT&T’s ongoing improvements is unclear: we know they’re adding towers, and our iPhone 2G seems to be doing a bit better as well.

Then there’s the much-discussed antenna issue. It’s real, not simply cosmetic, and confirmed by Consumer Reports. (Mini-rant: the frustrating part is not the hardware problem, but Apple’s all-too-typical response ranging from, “What problem?” to “You’re the problem.” It takes a special brand of arrogance to deny something so easy to reproduce.)

Otherwise…well, it’s an iPhone. Overall a delight to use, irritatingly locked down at times, occasionally annoying. The Droid should be arriving soon…