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.

Nest | The Learning Thermostat

I’m certainly not the only person to talk about Nest this week, so I won’t try to dig too deep into it. I just wanted to note it, and comment on how nice it is to see design coming to the forefront of those hidden pieces of tech. Thermostats have been incredibly difficult to use ever since they became digital, it’s nice to step back a bit to an old style without a ton of buttons.

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.

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 don’t know his history, I don’t know where he learned this, but I’d really like to have a beer with this guy and talk shop.

http://www.mikematas.com/

He’s been somehow able to get rid of all the fluff, and in most cases remove all design to make the leanest experiences I’ve used, a ton of iphone apps.

Lately I’ve been noticing a combination of UX techniques that are combatting each other. I’m singling out Svpply here, but it’s really happening at any number of sites. I’m talking about an infinite scroll and a fat footer.

The point of the fat footer is to have a simply accessible area on any given page through which to find information in a site. The infinite scroll adds the benefit of a page that loads content as it’s scrolled to, offering a ton of content without a page break, or a massive preload.

What happens when you mix the two, is a page where the fat footer is nothing but a tease, hinting at something more to come, but flitting away before you can click anything, as the infinite scroll adds more content and whisks the links away.

I tend to avoid criticizing other people’s work on the internet, because I’m not aware of the details that lead to the decision, but this is something not limited to one site, it’s a clash of techniques.

My initial thought is that this could be solved simply by anchoring a thin version of the fat footer at the bottom of the browser, or even to the side at the bottom. It could be locked in place, with the infinite scroll whizzing by all the time the footer isn’t needed.

The second thought is that if you are going to use an infinite scroll, don’t use a footer that has content people need, but that’s less productive criticism, right?

http://www.41latitude.com/post/2072504768/google-maps-label-readability