Chris Messina has posted a variety of concepts for Mozilla he did for Mozilla last year — all of which are a great study in user experience.

Working with the team, I produced a series of mockups and written pieces that were designed to first layout a future scenario for what I call “pop computing” — an era when computing is cheap, facile, and a part of the everyday environment.

Patrick Patience has posted a fantastic little summary of jailbreaking hacks over at Smoking Apples. He’s got some gorgeous themes and extensions working together, complete with links and extended info—it’s definitely worth taking a look.

The “Deep” iPhone theme, well photographed by William Hook.

I’m considering using this free set of mobile icons for some demo apps. You get what you pay for, though, they unfortunately don’t scale very well at smaller sizes.

Design Police offers a downloadable “Visual Enforcement Kit” (PDF) with labels for everything from “Bad typography” to “Sever lack of creativity.” I would pay good money to get these as stickers, and I would probably use them every day until being fined for defacing private property.

As a concept, multitasking goes beyond just background processes. There’s an aspect of multitasking which is purely visual. For example, when developing a website, I’ll often put the Photoshop file next to my browser, for comparison.

In a roundabout way, this means the iPad already has multitasking. Consider apps like Mail where, on the iPad, the list view and detail view have been combined to one screen. Users can not only read an email, but also instantly see when the previous email in that thread was sent, who sent it, and delete it—all without losing their place. To me, this is a form of multitasking. Extending this split screen idea to the app level presents a difficult UX challenge, but could be a better approach for multitasking than the typical “windowed” metaphor used on desktops.

I’d be remiss not to mention the release of Windows Phone 7 Series last week. Microsoft has taken a leap of faith here—completely reworking their mobile offering from the ground up. There is a newfound focus on touch and gestures, UI design, and social networking integration.

I think Microsoft has a success here. In addition to a generally pleasant looking user interface (though Tufte disagrees), the software is also hardware independent like Google’s Android—in contrast with Apple’s closed iPhone OS. Unfortunately, there are no actual devices yet which run Windows Phone 7 Series, though I’m sure we’ll see some very soon. All in all, the release may not be enough to save the failing mobile platform (primarily from the burden of IE), but it looks a great last stand.