FLICKR PHOTO MAP

Last week I came across the new iPad app Flickr Photo Map (Flickr btw didn’t release it) that displays photos that are geo tagged inside of Flickr. I really like how it has changed how I explore Flickr on my iPad and thought it would be a good exercise to compare it with my other favouriet iPad photo app—Thomson Reuters Galleries. The glue is that both apps display images though one is a public feed while the other is an edited collection updated daily.

THOMAS REUTERS
By far the best feature to me is the fact that it takes galleries that are already on the web and makes the visual experience even better on the iPad. The images load fast and can be viewed full screen. Spending ten minutes on the edited galleries of any given day gives a viewer a pretty good idea what’s going on in the World. It’s not grabbing every story but it still sheds light on a lot of world events. The catch of course is that the images are selected and edited so of the millions of images taken over a week a person is seeing only a small fraction.

The home screen displays a number of current galleries along with a couple slightly older ones. As far as I can tell there isn’t any way on the app to find stuff that might be older than a couple weeks—I still have to go to the web site for that. I also have no filter control so I can’t decide to see more images or dive deep into any one section. I also have no where else to go once I’ve finished one set. If I make it through an entire set the chances of me wanting to see more images related is pretty high. But for a free app I can’t really complain too much. If I had more controls, had the ability to save favorite images & galleries and was able to zoom in, I’d probably pay a monthly subscription. Of course if I end up waiting for images to load I probably wouldn’t pay.

FLICKR PHOTO MAP
I’ve been complaining for a while that Flickr has done nothing with the iPad. They still haven’t but one person has taken their api and started displaying Flickr geo tagged images on a map. The app is far from perfect but I’ve found myself drawn more and more to it. The biggest issue is that a viewer thinks their seeing images viewed in real time—which it isn’t. The same set always loads when a person turns on the app. However there are filters such as tags, text, place and username that allows for control. I’ve found that if I tweak some of the controls I can get a decent date range. While it isn’t real time I can get a good sense of what has happened in the past couple of days.

My favourite feature is zooming into an area. As I zoomed into particular cities and streets it was amazing to see what photos had been taken. I visited old cities I used to live in, where I currently live and places I might not ever visit. The iPad is the perfect display unit for maps with images. Comparing the app experience with Flickr on the web in the context of geo, there was no comparison.

Ironically the weakest part of the app is trying to see an actual image in full screen. The natural tendency is to expect a larger image once a finger is pressed on it. However what does happen is a thin dialog box appears with the text that corresponds with the image. The idea is ok but the reading experience isn’t good at all. The only way to see a larger image is to press on the “i” button at the end of the text. Once pressed the image become bigger with the same text below. This is the pop up I would have expected with a previous press, not two presses. However with that pop up open a person has the ability to visit the Flickr page of the photo. Again the experience is perfect but comparing to the web there’s really no parallel that I’ve explored with.

ONE VS THE OTHER
They’re really hard to compare feature to feature because they’re system of selecting images is completely different. The fun thing to do is take some of the best features in each and try to combine them. Being able to explore Reuters via geo would be pretty cool plus allow more galleries to be displayed, for the Flickr map if I could see collections of what people had favorited would be a great daily and weekly experience. Both of those systems would balance the need for a streaming feed while giving real people a chance to decide what is worth viewing.

I had the pleasure of talking with Andrew Losowsky, the person behind Stranded: Stories from underneath the Icelandic Ashcloud, Stack America (something I’ve talked about in the past on the blog), and a great travel series of books among many other publications. Part of me wishes I had recorded the conversation as we went all over the place in terms of publishing, story telling, analytics & algorithms, artist in residencies, the iPad, urban signs and typefaces.

The main thing that I wanted to mention in the post was the publication of Stranded. Over the summer there was an incredibly unique situation in that people all over the world were stranded do to the volcano in Iceland. Andrew commisoned people all over to submit there stories, images of where they stayed and other contextual elements that would help share the story. I remember reading about the magazine but actually didn’t realize it was from Andrew until he mentioned it last night. Above are a couple images from the first printed copy taken in the dark lobby of Ace Hotel. The magazine is now available at Magcloud. An interesting fact to note is that most of the submissions came from New York, London and Tokyo. The situation was incredibly unique and the stories attached to the publication and a layer that news coverage really couldn’t get to.

The other set of images I uploaded here come from the beautifully designed series of travel books from Le Cool. Cities designed for include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, London, Madrid. Part of it reminds me of an updated version of Colors magazine and a lot of great information design with maps and stories. It was the first that I had come across the series and thought to myself even if I wasn’t going to any of those cities I’d still find the stories interesting.

Last night I ended up with my camera at the right time and place to capture a view of the September 11 Tribute In Light. The best way I can describe seeing those beams at eye level is surreal. There’s a lot of life circling those two streams which is fitting.

I actually came to the NYT story Broadway Is Busy, With Pedestrians, if Not Car Traffic from a post on Reuters by Felix Salmon How the NYT sees bikes on Broadway which offers a fascinating counterbalance to the original article. However that isn’t what I’m wanting to post about. What I did want to note is that the info graphic is an interesting study of simplification and visualization of a street that I’ve often walked down. If a person walks down any of those cross sections of bike lanes, car lanes and sitting areas, it changes constantly yet has a consistent flow. I’ve often wondered what the pattern looked from above—now I know.

Yesterday while working on a multi touch iPad UI issue with Chris Fahey, the phrase “gesture deficient” came up. We were looking at some of the iPhone swipe actions to multi delete and wondered how many people like or even know about some of the things a person can do to swipe. Essentially there’s features built around those that are “gesture deficient”, for those that didn’t know that they can swipe delete things on their iPhone. This also relates to the iPad as well. One interesting response that I was asked about on Twitter after mentioning the statement was “what is the “unsuck” definition of that?” To that I replied “possibly swipe happy or happy tapper”.

Continuing on the swipe theme on a touch screen, I came across the iPhone game We Sliders. At first there doesn’t seem much to it. It’s actually quite ambient. There’s no music (though that would be cool), just shifting colour as a person moves the bars. As far as I can tell the goal is to sync the bars together by moving them side to side. At first there’s just two bars, once that level is completed is becomes three and after that it increases incrementally. I managed to get to six bars last night. As far as experiences go I’d rate this pretty high just on the uniqueness of the game and the discipline to keep it very simple (yet difficult) in terms of game play.

This morning as I do every morning that I walk to work I try to capture a photo of something that caught my attention. Today I stopped to notice a poster that had QR code on the bottom of it. Up until now most of the QR code stuff that I’ve seen on ads has been pretty gimmicky—but something about the placement had me curious. Plus the poster was from nyc.gov so I figured it probably had more value than just a coupon.

The three images show the chronological order of events. First I saw the poster, hence photographed it. Once I uploaded the image to Flickr I pulled out iPhone and pointed it at the QR code. Once read a bit.ly url popped up so I opened the url on my MacBook Pro after I emailed myself the link. The link btw is http://nyc.gov/html/media/html/schedules/schedules.shtml#life_schedule Turns out that the link is for a schedule of events on a number of different NYC TV channels. Everything worked perfectly to get to the site however the schedule in terms of getting me interested was pretty low. For all the effort to get me to the site I would hope that they would take some time to make the schedule readable outside of an excel form. At the minimum, include an image with each of the headings, at the max give me some filtering options with descriptions.

While I’m scratching my head wondering why they didn’t make the entire experience great, I do have to mention that it is pretty rare that I take the effort to actually check the url on any poster.

Last weekend Madison and I met up with Sarah Cox of Core77 and Raleigh Pop fame in Washington Square park to discuss dogs and design. It was fun to hang out on an early Saturday morning talking about two of my favourite topics. If you’re curious to read some of the conversation, please visit Dogs on Design- Surtees’ Oversized Lap Dog.

Just received a really nice zine from Auckland, New Zealand from Amanda Wood. It’s 22 pages plus cover and is balanced between black & white images of cityscapes and text. While I do push the speed of technology on this blog, I have to admit that I really appreciate when someone takes the effort and time to create something like Sketches. When someone creates a pdf the thing can be as many pages as possible, infinitely colourful and any dimension. Looking at this zine it felt considered with the pace of the images, page count and of course the writing.

If you’re curious to see more for your self, visit http://www.vortex.net.nz/sfsl.

This post is half recap, half collection of a couple mobile apps that found out about last night and how I saw things take off. I came across a post from Bob Lefsetz who typically writes about the music industry though occasionally brings something else into the mix. He was talking about a ski resort that was thinking more into the mobile future than anyone in the music industry. There was a lot of good points plus the attached video of the ski resort implementing check in’s was pretty smart. This was the quote I tweeted to link to his post:

What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a resort company utilizes this concept before a music company?

A couple minutes later I looked at my stats from bit.ly to see how many people had clicked on it. At first I thought the number was an error but it turns out that Scobleizer rt’d it. It was fascinating to watch how the rt’s flew after that. Just like the post Visualizing How a Link Spreads Through the Twitterverse I was watching this happen in real time. Usually if someone passes along something I’ve mentioned things pop a tiny bit, this was a different magnitude.

The bigger deal in all this to me is the different type of services that offer check in’s. Some are trying to be all things to all businesses, while other’s are just for one particular market—in my example a a ski resort. I’m not sure who was behind the design of Epic Mix though I have a couple guesses. The video is quite compelling and covers a lot of angles that haven’t been completely thought out until now. A small but important feature is that they’ve also tried to solve the feature of kids checking in. The tech behind the service is already getting a lot of attention.

One other mobile check in service to take a look at to compare is Festival Crowd. I haven’t played with the service at all, it looks like it does speak to some of the features that Lefsetz was wanting. All these check in’s plus push to a third party is going to be the minimum very soon in terms of how busiesses and events become a better experience. The days of just having a listing of events as the site are over.

Sunday morning I had the opportunity to hang out with Randy J. Hunt, a smart design guy that I respect a lot. He has a habit of mentioning great places to eat so when he emailed me on Saturday wanting to meet up on Sunday I wasn’t going to say no. I had never been to Pulinos before but have walked by it quite a bit with Madison checking out what was going on Bowery.

We ended up splitting a couple pizza’s. There was the Nutella (extra virgin olive oil, sea salt + nutella) and the Ottima (Ricotta, wild blueberry jam + bacon). Having never had those combinations before I wasn’t sure what to expect. The Nutella was a plain thin crust with a side dish of Nutella and sea salt. The Ottima was had a decent proportion of the description above. They were both amazing for different reasons. Nutella and sea salt are a great combo while the ottima was a solid combination of three elements.

While the food was really good what made me want to do this post was the bathroom. Strange as that sounds there was a perception shift that I had never really felt before. A lot of bathrooms in NYC are multifinctional—meaning they’re both for women and men, but the doors at Pulinos would suggest otherwise. Walking down the stairs there’s two doors—women’s and men’s. Kind of obvious until a person washes their hands. The bathroom was empty while I was there, though I suspect the experience would have been different if I had seen anyone inside. In any case as I turned my head to my right I noticed that both the women’s and men’s doors lead to the same spot that I was standing. It was a really interesting gut hit to see that. I could have photographed the whole experience after the fact but I think it is worth going through without the visual ahead of time.

I would love to know the process of how this bathroom came to be. I’m going to assume that this idea isn’t completly unique but it was the first time I’ve experienced it first hand. That situation was a great example of taking a set of parameters that most people would have complained about, and made it something memorable to the context of a shared bathroom which isn’t exactly uncommon in NYC.