I’ve been working on something for a long time, and finally got around to making it happen.

Freshly is a way to find out what farmers’ market is near you, open, now. It’s driven by trying to remember when the markets are open, and where they are on which days. I wanted something that would keep me out of the supermarket when I just wanted to pick something up on the way home.

I’ve started with three cities I know well, New York, Toronto, and San Francisco. All the market information has been gathered by me now, but future markets can be added by anyone. At a glance you can see the markets nearby, and show what’s open now, tomorrow, or in the next week.

In the immediate future as I beta test, I want to get Freshly mobile optimized, then start expanding the offering including showing what’s in season at each market, and hopefully getting to the point where the farmers’ who will be at a market can show what they’re bringing that day. I’m very happy to have got to this point, thanks to the developer Chris Casciano.

Sign up and I’ll let you know when you can use Freshly www.shopfreshly.com

His thoughts here: Google search on iPad is bad design.

While some of the points he makes are valid, I have to disagree with the closing statement.

Designers really need to hear the following, loud and clear: The iPad browser is fully capable. It doesn’t need you to treat it differently. You’re fighting with users when you get fancy. Just stick with what works on the desktop. And if you must screw around, then make the opt-out obvious and painless.

The iPad browser is fantastic, it works well, often better than my desktop browser. I agree that changing content often doesn’t make sense in an iPad browser, but this isn’t one of those cases.

Look at the above comparison. I get Mr. Winer’s point about the whitespace, it could be reduced to get an extra result on the page. What doesn’t work though, is the way a tablet screen is intended to be used, tapping without worrying about what else you’ll hit. On the tablet optimized version, each link is clearly on it’s own, no ambiguity about what will be tapped. Can you zoom in on the default results and get a larger hit state? Of course, but you’re adding another step to the interaction. Zooming isn’t a great experience to be default, it’s a step around sites that haven’t been designed for tablet or touch.

Besides the tapping, I actually prefer the secondary functions tucked away, making a more clear layout with the results the most important part of the page. This is a return to the simplicity that made Google famous, getting to the point quickly.

Some of the most misguided attempts have been QR codes on billboards by highways, or on moving buses. It seems like there wasn’t even any thought put into the usability of those codes.

This isn’t just another blog post complaining about their use though, I just want to make a quick point about where they are still valuable: where the general public doesn’t have to touch them.

Think in-app airline ticketing, a quick scan of the phone as you board. Mobile coupons, no more clipping paper. Any time someone needs to convey information from device to a store we can still use QR codes, and it still makes sense, and it can still make the end-user’s life easier. To state it more simply, never make your user have to interact with a QR code.

Let’s not make QR codes all bad, let’s remember that technology needs to be used appropriately.

Problem is, I could never remember when the markets were open, or where they were. I got around this by just making a google calendar with all the markets listed by day and time. It worked pretty well, so I figured I’d go a step further and share with everyone by making a site.

Sign up now and I’ll let you know when it’s live.

Maybe a little backstory.

When the iPhone was first released, I was in the process of moving to San Francisco. The second day I was there, I stopped by an Apple store, picked up this amazing phone and my mobile experience was changed forever.

A couple years later, I was still using the same phone, that first generation iPhone. It worked great, though I had to jailbreak it when I moved to Canada. The 3G came out, then the 3GS, then the 4G, and I was still using that great iPhone. Eventually Google released Android, then the Nexus One, a phone I like to call “the greatest phone ever made behind the iPhone”.

Because I work in mobile, and a very large percentage of mobile users are on Android devices, I decided to jump on the Android bandwagon and order that Nexus One from Google. I was excited about it, and it worked well when I was excited. Once the shine wore off, the imperfections started to stand out to me.

Almost immediately I started to get dust under the screen, an annoyance only surpassed by the fact I couldn’t see the screen in sunlight. I could see my iphone screen. It didn’t get any dust in it either. This was really a small thing, although the longer I dealt with it the more it began to escalate from annoyance level to anger.

What really got to me was the design. This is my career, my livelihood, and my love. With my iPhone, things flowed seamlessly from one app to another, and I never had to learn a new way to work. With Android, I never knew what I was going to get. Some included the menu in the app, some were under the menu button. Some used the back button in app, some back buttons sent me to the home page, some to the last app I used. To make this more frustrating, when I tried to tap that back button, it’s hit area was higher than the label, something I’m told is known but has never been fixed.

A few months ago I started thinking about the iPhone 5. I knew it was coming, so I wanted to hold off on replacing my increasingly more frustrating Nexus One, which had started giving me “out of memory” errors, no matter how much I deleted. I heard it was going to be August, no problem, I can make it. Then September, damn, a little long. Now I’m hearing October and I can’t do it, I was too pumped up about a new iPhone, especially since I had been leering at my wife’s iPhone 4 for 5 months at this point.

So I stole my kid’s phone. She’s got my Nexus One, I’ve for a 3.something iOS first gen iPhone, which besides the lack of GPS, has been far better than my latest Android experience.

For the next couple of months I will keep going with this archaic iPhone, and I’m happier about that than I have been for the last year and a half of Android. I’ll keep the Android around, I need to test, I need to understand what’s happening over there, but I can’t do it every day anymore. I can’t keep setting design aside anymore.

I’ve missed you, iPhone, and I’m looking forward to version 5.

They paid so much attention to the little details, but kept it a simple experience. So important for a kid to be able to play without getting distracted by more flashing lights and bells.

MDC partners has posted on their blog about the Reader function of mobile Safari, and are making it seem as if advertising will cease to exist.

So what exactly is Reader?

In a nutshell: Reader is a feature that allows users of the Safari mobile browser to prevent advertisements from being displayed in the news stories they read.

It’s actually a little more than that, Reader strips all formatting from the article, presenting the content as plain text on a page. It’s a great way to consume content, particularly long form text found in lengthy news articles. It’s not designed to prevent ads, ads are just one of the things that are distracting readers from their goal.

Their goal on a news site is to read the news, to consume content. The point of ads is to distract the reader in order to inform them of a service or product. These are opposing forces, with the advertisers trying to break the flow of the reader’s original intention. Readers aren’t going to a news site to look at ads, they aren’t seeking information about a product, the advertising has always been a necessary evil in order to pay for the production of that news. In the past, readers have just ignored ads, as shown by the abysmal click through rates. To fight this banner blindness, advertisers started to make their ads gaudy and aggressive -including actually blocking the content- so ad blockers became popular. Reader is the next evolution of this active aggression against ads, but also it’s an attempt to avoid over-designed content.

I make my living creating advertising, but my reaction to Reader is not that my livelihood is disappearing, instead I think this is a step forward in our evolution.

Banner ads were a reaction. They were news sites reacting to having a website for the first time, and seeing it as if the internet were paper, where ads covered the costs and made tons of money. They were a reaction from us advertising people saying we’ll handle ads the same way we did in newspapers except now we can make them move. The problem is, it was the wrong reaction, from both of us.

For the most part, we’ve failed to innovate, and have kept going with banner ads though the results were never extraordinary. Now it’s time that we look at ads in a different way. How can we get our message to consumers in a way that is useful, an experience, even delightful?

It’s time for us to stop complaining about the ad blockers, and start thinking about new ways to have a conversation.

http://www.mdc-ideas.com/2011/06/10/apple%E2%80%99s-new-mobile-browser-a-threat-to-online-adverting/

I’m participating in Movember this year, growing a ‘stache to raise money for prostate cancer research. In 2010 4,400 men will die of prostate cancer, and I’d like to do my small part to help stop that.

My embarrassingly scratchy progress will be posted on my movember page http://ca.movember.com/mospace/784546/ where you can also donate to the cause.

Thanks for your help!

I just noticed this intro to DraftFCB’s site. It’s an interesting approach to user experience on a site that has a variety of user flows. Off the top of my head, they could have potential clients, current clients, job seekers, someone looking for an address, and so on. They answer any of those questions with this simple question and drop down, not a page full of flashy work.

It’s a brave direction for them to take, but I think it works for them.

1. Don’t take advice/rules lists too seriously, they’re all made up of people’s personal experiences and aren’t law.
2. Empathy will make you a better designer, especially when you’re not designing for yourself.
3. Develop your own list, based on real life experience, not what other people have told you.

The first problem I keep having with these lists is that many of them are so definite, as if the author’s experience fits the reader’s perfectly. It may be a pet peeve, but there are no absolutes, and passing down an individual experience as an absolute isn’t helpful, it’s constricting the world view of the person who takes it as gospel.

The second problem, is that by sharing their life experiences as rules or advice, the list becomes about ego. Granted, most blogs are about the author’s ego to start with, but when these lists are shared, they become the Fox news of blog posts – quick snippets taken out of context that are easy to pass around and share without putting any critical thought into them.

What I’ve found is that everyone needs to develop their own list, and that means taking other people’s experiences and your own, and factoring in context. We all owe it to ourselves to think through the rules we follow, and to keep that list of rules changing for our whole lives.