Forgive me if this sounds a bit gushing, but as a long-time sucker for Apple’s temptations, I have been waiting for this one with childlike anticipation. And now that it is on my phone, I can say, hand on heart, that ESPNcricinfo’s iPhone app is a thing of beauty. And before anyone accuses me of being an Apple evangelist, let me add that this app is also available on the Android platform.

Shrinking a huge site like ours to fit a mobile device was a challenge. “It’s a bit like building a scale model of a luxury car,” says Anil Nair, our director of Wireless Services. “The only difference is, you need to be able to drive it.”

Anil and his team have done quite a job of it. We have had a fairly handy mobile-optimised site for a couple of years now, but I have always preferred to use the full site, even on my phone, which can be a struggle at lower bandwidths. I can happily switch over to the iPhone app now: it gives richness and depth at a good speed.

Like all good iPhone apps, ours is simple and intuitive. The home screen offers quick access to news, scores and results, and to our lead writers. And the full menu offers a lot more, including video and audio, the full magazine section, and records. I was curious about how they’d fit cricket records tables, which often run into several columns, on a phone screen. They have found a simple solution: the columns are stacked up vertically, as against the traditional across-the-page display.

Perhaps the niftiest thing about the app is the lean-back mode, which gives you the option of turning your home screen into a digital clock-like display, with scores ticking away instead of time. There are push notification options for instant alerts for wickets, batsman milestones and score updates during live matches. You also have the ability to customise and filter news, results and fixtures by the team of your choice.

Almost without our noticing it, nearly 25% of the traffic on ESPNcricinfo is now through mobile devices and the smartphone market is growing rapidly. This app is affirmation of our commitment to bring cricket to you in the best-possible manner on each of your preferred platforms.

Like many of the really good things in life, the app is free.

You can download the app here.

PS: A lot of you have enquired about the Android app. It has been launched and can be found here.

I am sure you haven’t failed to notice the steady increase in video content on the site. While it hasn’t changed our faith in the invincibility and timelessness of the written word, we are also committed to exploiting the inclusiveness of our medium and present to our readers any additional options for consuming our content. Ian Chappell is still doing the same match analysis for us from the Ashes, but it’s now on video; which makes it a richer experience.

But of course, video brings huge challenges. To start with it costs much more and is far more time-consuming. And then, on a professional level, it brings challenges in terms of skill. In addition to writing his daily pieces, Andrew Miller, our UK editor, has taken it upon himself to record Chappell, who has been wonderfully patient and accommodating as always, and upload the raw file, which can consume an hour, or even more.

And recently we sent off senior editor Sharda Urga, who joined us earlier this year after more than 20 years in print, to interview Kapil Dev on video, and she came back wiser. I’ll let her relate her experiences:

“For print, you do some homework, scribble down a series of questions, check if you have new batteries and tapes [it's what the pre-digital generation does] at your command, test them for 30 seconds and then go and wait where you are supposed to. Hopefully the star turns up, is in a good mood, talks for ages and tells you his deepest secrets.

“After transcription, you arrange the questions in whichever order makes them [and you] look intelligent. Often you can even reinvent the question so that it suits the answer. [Sometimes the fast bowler really doesn't want to offer an existential answer about his soul, and talks about his soles instead.]

“Television is a different biscuit altogether. No, actually, it's a different grain. What it involves is inches and angles that exist outside the print journalist’s concerns and questions. It involves audio-visual machines. More gadgetry! Each of which had better be right or the alternative reality includes cantankerous cameramen and peeved producers. Is the lighting right or are lights needed? [They are two different things]. How about the sound? Would someone leaping into a swimming pool 20 feet away ruin the track?

“All you must do is keep quiet (until someone says, “rolling”) and focus. Make sure the questions are in correct sequence, no leaping back and forth with various topics. Club them together logically (print people don't do logic or sequence, but the video business doesn't care). This is so that they can be edited quickly, cut correctly, uploaded/ broadcast seamlessly.

“Speak in prose. No um-ming, er-ing, ah-ing. No matter how smart your rejoinder or supplementary question may be, no interrupting the subject. Never. He/she must first finish the answer and full-stop it before you are permitted to open your mouth. Abandon your ego and get used to doing "noddies". Which is to sit in front of the camera after the interviewee has left and nod your head. It's to fill in the visual gaps. To help the guy who will be cutting the interview. Oh, and please don't ask dumb questions.”

And you thought journos thought they knew everything.

At ESPNcricinfo we are always trying to expand our range. We are fortunate that the canvas and the tapestry of cricket often allow us to venture out of our crease without feeling silly. That said, though, a travel section on a cricket site isn’t as radical as it might seem: in fact, having got the section up and running, we’re wondering what took us so long.

All sports are shaped by their environment. There is a reason why cricket has struggled to find a base outside the Commonwealth nations. Within cricket, different countries, regions and states provide the game with its varied hues and textures. Not only do the Indians play their cricket in a distinctly different style and manner from the West Indians, Mumbai cricketers play the game differently from those in Delhi, just as cricketers in Yorkshire are different from those in Lancashire.

To fully understand and appreciate cricket, you need to understand the places it’s played in. And as cricket’s biggest tournament travels to the World Cup, we have built a section that will allow you to explore the host countries before the World Cup begins.

This isn’t merely a travel site about where to stay and what to eat and see. Those essentials are all there, but we’ve also made an attempt to find the cricket pulse of each city, explore its cricket heritage, and share cricket experiences.

If you’ve ever wondered why Bangalore has always produced cricketers who are gentlemanly and self-effacing, though still confident, Suresh Menon has an explanation. Soumya Bhattacharya explores matters of the heart when he writes on what Eden Gardens and Sourav Ganguly mean to the residents of Kolkata. Elsewhere, Sharda Ugra writes about watching cricket in Colombo when it felt like West Bank on an island, and Jayaditya Gupta describes the not immediately apparent charms of Ahmedabad.

Even the recommendations come cricket-flavoured. We tell you about the best places to stay, eat, party or shop in near the cricket grounds, and there’s expert advice from resident cricketers themselves. Yuvraj Singh has a list of five must-dos for his hometown Chandigarh, one of which suggests a trip to "the most trustworthy and efficient petrol station in all of Punjab". Kumar Sangakkara gives you the lowdown on what to do when in Kandy. There’s also Parthiv Patel on Ahmedabad, Mahela Jayawardene on Colombo, Shakib Al Hasan on Dhaka, and lots more.

Each of the 13 host towns for the World Cup has its own homepage. Here’s the one for Delhi, to get you started.

Fresh articles will be added these pages in the coming days. And you too can contribute. What advice would you give to tourists coming to your cities? And what shouldn’t they miss doing before leaving? Tell us also about your memories of watching, playing or anything else cricket-related. To write in, click here here.

Some news on a new addition to the site from Will Luke, who defected from the editorial team to become our social media manager, and is rather enjoying himself:

We implemented the now-ubiquitous "thumbs up" like button from Facebook at their F8 launch earlier this year and it's been tremendously successful, with thousands of you liking and recommending stories, players, countries, teams and series each day. This was good, but we felt there was a lot of scope for improvement and an opportunity to offer personalisation.

If you actively decide that you like a particular player, or your favourite team, then we feel that's a strong enough indication to us that you're interested in hearing more about that person or country. So now, if you've already liked a certain individual on ESPNcricinfo.com, you'll receive any related stories which are published on the site - straight to your Facebook wall. It includes a summary of the story and a link, so you can go straight to it or share it with your friends.

For example, you could like England, MS Dhoni and Kevin Pietersen and perhaps The Ashes. When an England story is published, you'll be pinged on Facebook. If Pietersen cracks a ton, you'll be first to hear. And when Ricky Ponting decides to bat on an unseasonal greentop at the 'Gabba next month, the Ashes will be fed straight to you without you lifting a finger.

We hope you enjoy it.

You are reading this on a page different from the one you’re used to seeing for a Cricinfo blog.

I must admit it took us longer to get here - the blogs section was feeling, in a visual sense, more and more disconnected with the other parts of the site - than we bargained for, but it’s been a busy few months for the design and production teams. Since the redesign of Cricinfo, they have relaunched a Formula One site and delivered a World Cup one for Soccernet, while continuing to polish Cricinfo.

The real purpose of a redesign, of course, goes beyond the cosmetic. Not only does the blogs section now look better integrated with the rest of the site, we also believe it is more reader-friendly. The page headers are cleaner and sharper, the text-display panel wider, and the type better spaced. The navigation has been shortened to make it look less cluttered, and all blogs are available via a couple of dropdown menus and on the page footer.

More importantly, your voice finds a more prominent space. We have introduced a comments feed on the right-hand column of the blogs homepage, which is an invitation to you engage in a meaningful discussion not only with the writers but among yourselves. Also, there are now feeds for comments – for all blogs and individual ones.

This is the second significant section redesign for us this fortnight. Most of you will have seen our new Video and Audio page, which as the name suggests, combines our multimedia offerings. Among the improvements: a larger video player that enhances the experience of watching a clip manifold, and a more visually appealing listings display, with pictures for each item.

As always, some of you might miss the familiar, but clearly, it was time to move on.

	Sachin Tendulkar - breaking records on field and online © Getty

Sachin Tendulkar’s record-breaking didn’t stop on the field on February 24. He shattered many on Cricinfo. We recorded 45 million page views that day, and our highest number of unique users in India and the United States. The match report for the Gwalior ODI became Cricinfo's single most read piece of content.

It has always been so. If evidence was ever needed to confirm Tendulkar’s status as the world’s most-adored cricketer, it can be found in our logs. Month after month, year after year, he remains the most-searched cricketer on Cricinfo; by a huge margin, his profile page is the most visited player page on the site; and in any given month, headlines (often more than one) featuring his name are among the top 10 on the site.

Among other things, he also broke a couple of our servers that day.

Trust me, we make serious contingency plans for peak moments, and certainly we have never underestimated your love for Tendulkar. But obviously, there is no accounting for it. As he stood a couple of runs away from making history, so many of you logged in together that our servers blinked. It was a desperate few minutes, but in a sense, it was also a moment of vindication of your faith in us. Many of you got on Twitter to vent your frustration, and there was one post that stood out: “You know you are large when you crash Cricinfo.”

We hope to be ready for the next peak. We have just ordered some Tendulkar servers.

	An example of a pitch map © Hawk-Eye

You have seen it all on television, and it's likely that you would have caught it on Cricinfo during the Champions Trophy. But here's the real deal: Hawk-Eye, the ball-tracking technology that ensured that umpiring in cricket matches was never the same, has now been fully integrated into our live match coverage.

And there is one thing we can offer you that television doesn't. The internet advantage makes you the master. All the graphics that the television producers showed you are now at your disposal. Now create those pitch maps, beehives and wagonwheels at your will and at your leisure.

But before you start exploring, here are some useful tips from S Rajesh, our stats editor, who's having some fun himself.

The Pitch Map - Shows where the ball has pitched, and moving the mouse over each ball gives more details - over number, batsman, bowler, runs scored; clicking on the ball gives the trajectory of that ball.

Ball speeds - Shows the speed for each ball bowled by every bowler, with a marker to indicate the ball in which a wicket fell. Moving the mouse over the graph for the bowler shows the over of the innings, the batsman on strike, and the runs scored off that ball. You can also click on it to see the trajectory of the ball.

Beehive - Shows where the ball has passed the batsman. Again, can be drilled down to each ball, with a click showing the trajectory of that ball.

Variable bounce - A graphic which differentiates, by colour code, the balls which would have hit the stumps from those which would have gone over the stumps. A pitch with variable bounce would show balls in the same area having different colour codes.

Wagon wheel - A stroke by stroke account of runs scored, with an option to see the trajectory of each ball.

Partnership - The total partnership for each wicket, and the contribution by each player.

Run rate - Line graph for run rates of each team, with details of runs scored in each over.

And so if you want to find out just why Dale Steyn was so deadly today, first look for the pitch map, and then his beehive.

Ricky Ponting’s case went beyond the numbers alone which were staggering in any case © Getty Images

Even friends are complaining that Cricinfo's Decade Review went on and on, and having suffered the 2007 World Cup, we know the feeling. In our defence we can only say that it was quite a decade and we were keen to cover as much ground as possible. Now the matter is behind us and we can move on to the next one.

Of course there have been questions about our very concept of a decade. Should the decade not end next year, a few of you asked. We have followed a simple principle: Do we ever refer to the year 1990 as part of the 80s? How then can 2010 be part of the noughties? Of course, there can be an argument to the contrary, but we simply made a choice.

There has been far more passionate debate about the final element in the Decade Review package, and inevitably so. It would have been a surprise had it been otherwise. But the disappointing aspect of it is how parochial some of that debate has been. Whether Ricky Ponting deserved to be the player of the decade is a question that can be asked without being narrow-minded and mean-spirited.

Happily enough for us, not a trace of nationalist bias could be found in our jury. Without breaching the confidentiality of the process, I can reveal a few trends. More Indian jury members gave the No. 1 ranking to Ricky Ponting than Australian ones did, and exactly the same number of Indians and Australians had Sachin Tendulkar among their top three players. Seven of our nine Indian panelists gave the No. 1 ranking to an Australian player, and three No. 1 rankings for Jacques Kallis came from outside South Africa.

I can exercise the liberty to reveal my vote. I didn¹t choose Ponting as my No. 1. My player of the decade was Glenn McGrath; for to me it was he more than anyone else who was responsible for Australia¹s dominance till 2007. Shane Warne had a strong case too, but he gave up playing one-day cricket in 2003. But Ponting won by an overwhelming margin, and in our collective wisdom the right choice was made.

We asked the jury to choose the Player of Decade on the basis of quality of their performances, consistency and durability, contribution to their team's overall performance, and the impact they had on the game on the whole. Ponting’s case went beyond the numbers alone which were staggering in any case. He led, both with the bat and on the field, Australia to two World Cup wins, and his fire has kept Australia burning even after they lost all their great players apart from him.

It was never a question of who was the best player over a whole career. In a list of all-time great batsmen, Tendulkar and Brian Lara would always be, at least in my book, ahead of Ponting. But their best years were in the 90s. As were Warne's. No batsman has dominated the decade of the bat as much as Ponting.

Cricket is a small community. It must celebrate its greats without reservation or rancour.

Let me enter the guilty plea at the beginning. I could offer up a dozen excuses why this page hasn’t had a new entry for a couple of months, but that would be a waste of space. All I can offer is a promise to be more regular.

It's been nearly three weeks since Cricinfo’s new look was launched. Your feedback continues to pour in, and it is gratifying to us that it does. Most of you have liked what you have experienced, and many have offered constructive criticism about the things you haven’t liked. Some of you who have absolutely hated it have let us know in the most certain manner possible. But even the angriest feedback has been reassuring: a reflection of what Cricinfo means to you, and how much you care.

We have been listening. Not just listening, but acting on several of your suggestions.

The full scorecard is now full again, with all the innings presented in a single frame, as opposed to behind tabs.

The local time has been restored on the scorecard pages (that was an oversight), the typeface for the commentary has been changed, and only boundaries and dismissals are now displayed in bold in commentary.

The other significant revisions have been on the homepage. The news links looked slightly orphaned under the strong main panel. We have now lifted them by adding bold headlines and organising them the way they used to be in the old design. The page looks more balanced now.

Download speed has been matter of concern for many. We were aware of the issue while redesigning the site. It is a richer page now, it has a larger lead photo, and there are more thumbnails and more links, so inevitably the page is heavier. And no, the video player isn’t contributing to the load.

It¹s perhaps a much smaller issue on broadband to which standard the world is marching inexorably but we have been working on the problem and I am happy to report that the page is quite a few kilobytes lighter already, and it's going to shed more weight yet.

The black news module has divided opinion quite sharply at that. Like it was with Geoff Boycott and Sourav Ganguly, it’s either love or hate (I loved them both), with little middle ground. The idea of using a strong colour on top was to create a focal point for the homepage, and to that end, it has already served its purpose: it has got plenty of attention. But we are not
impervious to the matter of readability, and let me assure you that the matter is under consideration.

Keep writing, and we will keep listening.

And here's what you ought to have read on Cricinfo last week.

What does Kevin Pietersen really want? Andrew Miller goes to the heart of the question and finds a simple answer: like a lot of us, he merely wants to be loved.

The countdown to the English summer has begun and we warm up to the job by introducing a weekly column on county cricket, once the nursery for the world game, but now English cricket’s favourite scapegoat, by Lawrence Booth, who writes regularly in the Guardian and occasionally on Cricinfo. Booth starts with a lament about the diminishing coverage of domestic cricket in newspapers, but ends with hope. A new saviour is at hand: the web.

Topicality was the last thing on Sidharth Monga’s mind when he got Mark Greatbatch to chat about his monumental match-saving innings against Australia in Perth in 1988-89 (655 minutes, 435 balls, 146 not out). But the piece became instantly relevant when Gautam Gambhir put up his own marathon (643 minutes, 436 deliveries, 137 runs) to save India the Napier Test.

And here’s a piece that I wish had been published on Cricinfo. Apart from his intellect and rigour, the thing I find most remarkable about Mike Atherton is his ability to look at the time he spent as an English player with dispassionate objectivity. He writes here with candour about his own Lewis Hamilton moment in 1994, when he was fined for lying to the match referee.

It's only the second week and I am already running a day late. Apologies, and here's the recommended reading list from the last week or so.

Australia surprised most cricket followers, and perhaps themselves, by swiftly demolishing South Africa to keep the Test mace. After a series of pieces on depressing subjects, Gideon Haigh was delighted to be able to write one on the new boys
who made the feat possible.

And Christian Ryan, recently the author of a biography of Kim Hughes, the golden boy who presided over one of the lowest periods in Australian cricket, found the Australian win all the more rewarding because it involved struggle.

As South Africa lay in disarray, Brydon Coverdale, Cricinfo's man on the tour, reported on the tension and confusion in their camp with such clarity that one of the members of the home side's management team remarked on how accurately it captured the mood and the goings-on in the dressing room.

Of course there was no getting away from cricket's troubles. Peter Roebuck captured the feeling in this evocative piece that posed this question: what now for cricket?

Just to remind ourselves how beautiful it all once was and how beautiful it can be, I leave you with this one, an extract from Rahul Bhattacharya's Pundits from Pakistan.

This blog has been a long time in the making. It’s a lame excuse, but I can offer the explanation that I was looking for the right tone for this blog because I also write in the other areas of the site. I don’t claim to have found it, but I have been shamed into action by John Brewin and Graham Jenkins, my colleagues at Soccernet and Scrum, Cricinfo’s sister sites, who have started their editor's blogs.

So first things first: this will not be a column, nor a journal or a diary. Rather, I am hoping that it will develop into a conversation. Cricinfo’s primary duty has always been to its readers, and one of the great gifts of the internet, is the connection it allows between the reader and the writer.

This page will be a modest attempt to further that connection.

It will also feature random reflections and observations forgive me, and feel free to chastise me, if it occasionally veers towards self-indulgence but mainly it will aim to draw you into the world of Cricinfo. I am always curious about what goes into the making of things I like: movies, books,
gadgets, magazines, or even cocktails and pasta, and I hope it will be of
some interest to you to get a peek behind the scenes at Cricinfo. Alas, that
will not include what Andrew McGlashan is up to in the evenings at the St
Lawrence Gap in Barbados.