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As of yesterday! Congratulations Brandon and Carla, welcome to the family Tyler!

This is already making it's way around the "blog-o-sphere", but I've got plenty of friends who are into web design but don't follow this stuff, so check it out. The Yahoo! UI Library is a collection of JavaScript widgets for things like calendars.

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is a collection of design patterns for web interfaces. Design patterns are a concept from "enterprise" programming, where best practice approaches to typical problems are described in a way that can be used by programmers using different languages. These patterns from Yahoo describe typical web UI patterns, such as paging multiple lines of search results.

There's nothing ground-breaking in the patterns, but it's useful to have these spelled out. It serves as a checklist, or a specification, if you find yourself having to implement one of these things. Even better, if you're asking someone else to implement some bit of web UI, giving them one of these patterns - modifying it if necessary -is a good way to make sure you're both clear on what you want it to do.

I went to the 4th monthly Mobile Monday London (aka momolondon), my third one. I missed the one last month at Yahoo's offices because I was in Turkey.

Google really laid on a slick hosting job. They had nice printed signage, including a label on the elevator button for the floor to go to, coat check, free t-shirts and pens*, plenty of free booze and food handed out by catering staff wandering the floor. The presentation equipment was also tops, dual projectors and the presenters' slide shows were technically seamless.

* Figuring out how to open the free pen may be an example of the infamous Google recruiting tests, it took about 3 or 4 different approaches before I figured it out. Maybe not something to brag about.

Oh yeah, the presentations themselves were pretty interesting as well. The theme for the evening was payment systems, in other words, ways for content providers to make enough money to make it worth doing. This probably is the biggest thing holding back the content industry, shady ring-tone clubs aside.

Shannon Maher from Google gave the first talk, and although it was the one least targeted to the theme, I think that most of the attendees, sated with Google-booze and delicious toothpick-meat, didn't mind. Google is building a new London-based mobile engineering team to complement their team in California. It sounds like their main reasons for doing this are to tap into the European mobile scene, given that as Mr. Maher said, the UK now has 100% penetration versus 70% in the US; and for partnerships with external organizations, including carriers (mobile network operators, as I usually call them), OEM's, and "industry", whatever that means.

Maher was fairly cagey on the specifics of Google's product plans, at one point begging that he hopes not to see his offhand musings blasted onto front pages the next day as announcements of new Google services. He said the first step is to bring existing properties onto mobile, then step 2 would be to innovate, and design for the mobile experience.

One thing he mentioned that I think resonated well with attendees is that Google considers small content providers as being of key importance, and wants to help them out. In an industry which cripples itself with walled garden strategies, breaking down the walls is the only way to get the kind of success people keep claiming is inevitable. Google is an ideal company to help with this.

An interesting point that Mr. Maher made was the fact that search is very different on the mobile. The mobile web is not nearly as well-linked as the regular web, so Google is struggling with finding all of the content that's out there so people can search it.

Other attendees raised questions about how people are actually going to "discover" mobile services. Very few people whip out their phone and go to Google to find things the way we do on the regular web. The operator portals can be a major source of traffic, but the most popular is the old fashioned texting a keyword to a shortcode approach. I believe that mixing non-mobile and mobile is the key, both for this discovery/marketing process and for most applications. There was some discussion on the floor about mobilized adwords and adsense, but I think there's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of using normal Google Adwords to drive people to mobile applications.

Margaret Gold presented Luup, which is Yet Another Payment Scheme (my term, not hers), basically a mobile-oriented Paypal. She used a new-fangled presentation style, rapid-fire slides with just a word or two or a picture, which was pretty cool. But when someone asked why Luup will succeed where others have failed, especially given that Paypal can easily move into mobile, her answer was pretty weak, basically saying there's room for more than one. The Network Effect suggests that there probably isn't room for more than one, and Paypal already has a massive head start. I don't think being the first into mobile will matter.

One thing a lot of mobile dotcom wannabees don't appreciate is that mobile is not an entirely new playground, it's just an extension of the web. There's a parallel here with the original dotcom bubble, where entrepreneurs thought the web was an entirely new economy, separate from the old one. It turned out to be just another facet of the old economy.

Jeremy Flyn from Vodafone talked about xPay, which sounds like a set of standards which is trying to pick up the pieces left from the crash of SimPay. One of the reasons SimPay failed was that it used a single model across Europe, but different European countries have very different economics for mobile content, including how much they pay out. Flyn repeatedly emphasized that the UK has the highest payout to content providers for premium SMS messages. So xPay is a UK-specific standard, which the operators and SMS aggregators will hopefully all sign onto.

Richard Watney from Reporo gave a fairly brief demo, using a phone, of their service, which basically seems to be a custom J2ME shopping applicaiton. Users browse shops that have signed up with Reporo, and Reporo stores credit card details and uses them to charge purchases.

So the talks were fairly interesting, although in a lot of ways there didn't seem to be anything very new. I think this demonstrates that online mobile services, although it's becoming very hot at the moment, is still struggling to find it's place in peoples' everyday life. I'd say we're basically at a similar stage to the 1996 Web, where very few people were actually making money outside of porn and ripoffs, and it's still difficult to make an unshakable argument that it will become a real, profitable, mature market. Personally, that's what makes it fun to me, just like then, it's uncharted territory.

Shot of the critter taken from a 3D scan.

Networked mobile apps are really heating up these days, with a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Yahoo and Google, plus of course many independent companies, including the one I work for. Grr. I'm checking out Yahoo Mobile, but I'm annoyed by their phone selection when I go to "what's on my mobile". They have a list of Nokia phones, and then "I don't know". I actually do know the model of my phone (N70), but it's not on the list, so what am I supposed to choose? "I don't know" causes it to ask me again when I try to check on each application. I'm sure I can get to them by just going straight in on my phone.

Gmail works nicely and intuitively when I hit it on my phone. My only complaint so far is it seems to take a least common denominator approach to phone capabilities, so when I go to read an email, it doesn't show the whole mail on one page. I don't know whether this is a fallback because Gmail doesn't know that the N70 can handle larger pages, or if it does this for all phones as a strategy for faster page loading. But it's annoying, because it means several clicks and several page loads to read an entire email, even a short one.

We're in the middle of our second week on holiday here in Istanbul, enjoying what will probably be our last holiday trip for a while.

The economy seems to be doing very well, certainly the exchange rate has held steady for a few years now. I originally came to Turkey in early 2001, just after the devaluation which kicked off a serious recession.

Last year the Turkish government finally took my suggestion (which I made to friends in a cafe several years ago, obviously the word trickled up) to re-issue their currency, dropping the last 6 zeroes. So the 20 million Turkish Lira note (the highest demonomination note in the world) is now the 20 YTL (New Turkish Lira) note.

With the 1 million lira note being just a bit less than a dollar in value, I always considered it to be the basic currency unit. Of course, for people who'd been living here before the devaluation, inflation was a constant, so they didn't have the same perception of 1.3 million lira to the dollar as being about the natural rate.

It's interesting that even a year after the redonomination of the currency, people still talk about millions and billions of lira. I wonder how long it will take people to get used to it.

The other thing I have to note about the economy is that Istanbul is not nearly the bargain it used to be. A nice dinner at a fancy restaurant, with starters, wine, and deserts used to run at less than $20 or so each, now it's around $60, closer to London prices. Groceries, clothes, and property are all not really that cheap.

I suppose that's good, in that it must mean the economy is OK, but I'm not sure whether peoples' salaries have kept up. I don't think teachers and other public servants have an easy time of it.

I'm kicking myself for not buying an apartment in the development where Ozlem's parents live. A $60,000 investment would now be worth at least triple that. With my 20/20 hindsight, I have to say I was a moron. Unfortunately prices have leveled off.

It will be interesting to see whether the economy holds strong. Discussing it with my brother in law, it seems Turkey tends to have a cycle of a few years of stability, followed by a crash. A lot depends on politics. The election next year will probably see the current government's huge majority in parliament shrink, although probably not disappear. One of the factors most likely to disrupt the economy would be political change.

Of course earthquakes, terrorism, further wars next door in Iraq, Syria, or Iran, or a falling out with the EU would not help things either.

If you're ever in Taksim in Istanbul and want a place to chill out for a bit, I recommend the Peripetie Bistro. We went there last week to meet one of Ozlem's best friends, one who always knows the best new places in Taksim. For those not familiar with Istanbul, Taksim is the main place for the bars, clubs, and cafes, although there are others like Kadikoy.

We drank mulled wine (well, Ozlem had a nice herbal tea), ate a brownie desert, and generally chilled. The decor is very nice, and they've got a lot of classy touches, like cinamon sticks in the mulled wine. A lot of the other people in there seemed to be youngish couples enjoying alone-time.

Ozlem and I have been asking parents we run into about their experiences raising kids with different languages, to get an idea of what we'll do ourselves. I'm now poking around on the Net a bit to see what's out there on the subject.

One of the more common situations we hear from parents who have different native languages is that it's important that each parent consistently use their own language with the child. An article by Marsha Rosenberg Raising Bilingual Children expands on this a bit, according to her the importance is consistency of situation. So it's not that the parent has to only and always speak the same language, but that they have consistent boundaries about the speaking of each language.

This fits with some people we've met recently, who both speak Portugese fluently (although the mother is not a native speaker) and speak it consistently with their daughter at home, but use English when outside. Rosenberg also suggests parents might alternate based on the day of the week, but that seems weird to me. The important thing, though, is that parents don't mix languages in a single conversation, otherwise the children will tend to learn it as a hybrid language - they won't easily distinguish the two lanuages.

Parents we've met who both speak the same language, but a different one than the community they live in, don't seem worried about speaking the local language at home. Certainly by the time the kids start school they will pick up the local language, and end up speaking it, possibly better than the parents' language. I do know one person raised in England by Greek-speaking parents, whose parents decided that one of them would use English with him, but it doesn't sound like that's strictly necessary.

One useful not from Rosenberg is that children should be exposed to the non-local language "in a variety of situations and with a variety of speakers. Rich language experiences in both languages are essential for good bilingual development." So for us, if the kid only speaks Turkish at home with Ozlem, over time (especially after starting school) their Turkish won't develop as well. I have a friend raised in Germany whose father speaks Danish with him, but he tells me when he visits Denmark people think he's retarded. I think we'll have an easy time of it since we know plenty of Turkish speakers in London, and hopefully we'll also get fairly frequent visits to Turkey to spend time with family.

One thing I haven't yet found any comments on, but is a concern of ours, is how we communicate with each other. Ozlem and I speak English to each other, because my Turkish sucks (and that phrase can also be turned the other way around - my Turkish sucks because I don't use it). Will this confuse the kid? Maybe not, but when Ozlem says something to the both of us, she'll want to use Turkish, which I may not understand, rather than English, which will dilute her use of it with the kid. The answer will probably be for me to raise my game. I should be able to improve my Turkish along with our kid!

More links:

• the bilingual families web page, is maintained by Cindy Kandolf, apparently in conjunction with a mailing list, looks to have useful resources.

Something to think about when designing a site or application is how you write your error messages. This grokdotcom article (which I can't find a byline for) encourages you to write messages that don't chastise the user for not understanding how your app works. The one comment I would make on this article is that any application developer (web or otherwise) who needs to think of the best way to phrase an error like "Phone number cannot contain dashes" should be shot.

I don't understand developers who take the time to check that a phone number has dashes (or credit card number has spaces) and chastise the user for it, rather than just stripping them out and getting on with it.

Vodafone, a British mobile operator, has bought Telsim, the second largest Turkish mobile operator. This is interesting to me since I spent some time working for the third largest mobile operator in Turkey, and currently work on the UK mobile industry. Telsim has a rocky past, they've always been a distant second to Turkcell, and has suffered from seriously dodgy owners, the Uzan family. The Uzan brothers founded Telsim, getting a ton of credit from the likes of Nokia to build their network, then refused to pay. For a while it looked like they'd get away with it, since they had more knowledge and connections in the Turkish legal and political systems, but in the end their business empire collapsed and was taken over by the government.

The interesting thing about the Turkish mobile phone market, at least 4 years ago when I was living and working there, was that very few people used monthly contracts. Most customers use "pay as you go", where you have to prepay for the time you will use. This was mostly down to price, the Turkish companies just didn't offer the kinds of deals that UK operators do. Vodafone may change this, they may even introduce contracts whereby people can get good phones at cheap prices when they sign a contract.

Turkey is a great market for mobile phones, it's such a social culture. I remember being impressed when I first visited Istanbul in 2000 at how pervasive they were. Mobiles were already common in the UK at the time, but in the US they still had an embarassing "yuppie" stigma.