Christina Warren has put together an interesting selection of tips for mobile application developers over on Mashable. It’s cross platform, and is worth printing out and pasting in front of whatever ever big printed PDF you use while coding.

While it’s not directly targeted at Symbian or MeeGo Gdevelopers (there’s a lot of Android and iOS screenshots), these rules of thumb are worth noting as being a mix of common sense, pragmatism, and allowing users to find out the good things about your app rather than the problems.

In summary:

1. Decide on mobile app or mobile website.
2. Think of where the app is used.
3. Think of different screen sizes.
4. Follow existing UI conventions.
5. Design for touch.

Reading through the detailed reasoning behind these, I couldn’t help but think these sounded rather familiar. Many years ago Steve had a page for shareware developers on his website. In his words “[it’s] far too out of date now” with many references to specific hardware and options, but the idea was the same as Mashable’s list.

Perhaps we should gather our own list here for mobile developers?