Last Friday saw the release of the iPhone 4S in stores across the UK. I happened to be in town and spotted that the Vodafone shop on the High Street had the new handset in stock and so, I treated myself to a little impromptu upgrade!

What's impressed me most, so far, is the speed of the processor and how smoothly it runs the exciting iOS5. Having taken part in Apple's betas, running iOS5 on an old 3GS for the past few months, I'd gotten used to a rather disappointingly sluggish interface. But with the new handset comes a new lease of life, my iPhone is like a spring chicken.

And so, to Siri

If you aren't familiar with the new Siri concept that Apple have introduced to the the iPhone 4S, then check out the videos on the Apple website. The general concept is not new. Many companies have tried and ultimately failed to implement a voice controlled interface over the past few years.

Having played a little with Siri and having gauged opinion on the internet, it seems that Siri, in it's present format, is fun. A novelty. But not particularly useful...yet. Knowing Apple, Siri will not be left to rot. History has shown that Apple will release a product in it's basic form to generate hype and then over the coming months, a number of tweaks and additions will be made in order to maintain that level of excitement and chatter.

For UK users, many of Siri's more useful functions such as finding a business, calling up directions etc are met with a dull "I'm sorry Matt, this service is only available in the USA." As disappointing as this is, I'm sure that it'll be opened up to UK users shortly.

API hooks for third-party apps? 

What I'd like to believe is that Apple will provide API hooks to use developers so that we can hook Siri into our own apps. Its level of voice to text accuracy is impressive and I cannot imagine that it'd be massively difficult to open the service up to third-parties for use. I'll be keeping my eyes open for more news and keeping my fingers crossed that we might be able to operate the likes of UK Solar Survey and Invoice Agent by voice in the very near future!

Having spent a large part of this evening preparing the foundations for a large UX review that we're conducting, it struck me how mobile frameworks, such as Cocoa for iOS and the Android SDK, are setting an exciting precedent for user experience.

Over the past few months, I've had the pleasure to work with native iOS and Android projects. On returning to web based app development, it has struck me how none of the common frameworks seem to put an emphasis on encouraging even the most basic of UI hints that the mobile frameworks insist upon.

The most strikingly obvious omission from the majority of everyday applications is what Apple refers to as the 'first responder' and you've probably never considered it up until now. If you have an iPhone or Android device, then you'll notice that when you open an app that requires an action, maybe a log in, the first input field is selected and the keyboard is on screen ready to go. Simple, right? So now open up one of your favourite websites, or maybe one that you've built...does it readily select the field that you're most likely to want. With a few exceptions, probably not.

Why not? Well, the mobile frameworks encourage the developer to provide a first responder out of the box but, to my knowledge, no web frameworks do so. It's a very simple UI tweak to achieve with a little bit of JavaScript, the focus() function is perfect if you have jQuery at your disposal.

It's really quite surprising how such a seemingly trivial afterthought can make your web app seem much smoother and easy to use so think about adding it to your apps in the future. There are a number of other simple tricks that mobile apps bring to the table that could help to improve usability of your web app too but maybe I'll talk about them in a later post.