Here’s a very representative photo of Guy. It’s not representative because he’s tough or anything, it’s because he spends his entire fucking life living and breathing video games. It’s really quite sad, and I fear that his fiancé doesn’t know what she’s getting into.

I guess that this obsession worked out. While at an E3 party where Guy was trying to find new ways to market addictive games to 13-year-old boys he bumped into Jordan Morris. Jordan is one half of the podcast Jordan Jesse Go. If you don’t subscribe to that podcast then stop reading and do so now. It’s great.

Guy asked Jordan if he thought that his buddy Jesse Thorn would be up for officiating the wedding. A couple of emails later and HOLY FUCKING SHIT he’s going to do it!

You see, Jesse is a man who knows something about appropriate dress. Check out Jesse’s Put This On project and you’ll see just how serious he is about dressing like a grown up. He’s really going to class up the joint, and we’ll need it.

I expect the wedding, taking place in Seattle this December, will truly be a momentous occasion.

The area where I’m working is especially bike friendly. From the window of this office I can see two bike shops. The London Bicycle Workshop appears to be a small place focused on quick fixes. Around the corner is the larger and VERY shiny Condor Cycles. They have a large selection of folding bikes, city bikes and Rapha gear.

Map of the office region

Condor Cycles’ selection of folding bikes

Track standing in wait for the green

Popular science recently added it’s entire 137-year archive to the web, including an article from 1962 about jetpacks.

A fan of WIRED is scanning and posting articles and advertisements from past editions. Remember Microsoft Bob from this 1995 ad?

Two years later, the Google Seattle team adds support for biking directions. It sounds like this was a lot more than simply flipping a switch and adding a new option in a drop down. A post on the Google LatLong blog describes some of the data and algorithms that go into great biking directions.

• Bike trails: Our maps contain over twelve thousand of miles of biking trails. First, we had to figure out where trails are…

• Bike lanes: For more than 150 cities in the US, we know which streets have dedicated bicycle lanes…

• Recommended routes: For many cities we also provide information on streets that have been designated as good for cyclists, so we them into account in our algorithm…

• Uphill slopes: … Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you’re biking on… Sometimes the model will determine that it’s far more efficient to make you ride several extra blocks than to have to deal with a massive hill. My teammates in San Francisco were relieved to see that this does indeed work!

• Downhill slopes: Many cyclists will tell you that going downhill is annoying for a different reason: you may have to ride your brakes all the way down…

• Busy roads: Cyclists often tend to prefer to stay off of fast roads, and not even cross them unless it’s necessary…

• Busy intersections: We try to avoid making you cross busy streets with a lot of car traffic and long wait times.

I tested out the new feature and it works great for my neck of the woods. True to form, I plotted directions from a brew pub in San Ramon to another in Walnut Creek. I’m not recommending that you ride your bike after sipping a few pints of Pliny, but it’s certainly better than driving. Google correctly plotted a route along the wonderful Iron Horse Trail, taking into account the various hops onto local roads as need.

Taking away the users’ ability to manually force an update is tricky. We like to feel in control and it’s hard to trust that a piece of technology is working as it says it will without our intervention. For example, software designers have learned that although automatically saving a document (or progress in a web app) is a better overall experience, it also gives anxiety to users. Users feel that they know they won’t lose work after clicking on a button labeled “save”. Harvest, the time tracking tool used by Adaptive Path deals with this by including a prominent “save” button near the “last saved” message although clicking the button is not needed. Google Docs uses a different approach, labeling the button “saved” and making it non-functional…. the user goes to click save and see that it’s already taken care of. It appears that Google is attempting to train us to stop worrying about ever saving documents.

With these thoughts in my mind, I started designing a status indicator that will appease users’ innate desire for control. On a regular interval, probably every 10 seconds, the app will connect over the network and check for new data. If found, that data will be downloaded and the screen will refresh with the latest status from the live event. It is possible that multiple refresh cycles could pass with no new data, in which case the indicator will need to reflect an increased time since the last update.

Here is my current design for the indicator:

Likely this strip will go at the very top or the very bottom of the app.

There’s two sections, the last update time and a countdown to the next refresh. The last update time reflects the time since new data was found. It’s likely that several refresh cycles will pass without new data. As this occurs the last update time will increase by the 10 second interval length. Once new data is found, the last update time is reset to zero, represented by the friendly “just now” text.

The countdown bar is a simple visual element that over the 10 second interval animates to give the appearance of emptying. Once the 10 second time has lapsed, the countdown bar is replaced by text that reads “updating” along with an animated spinner. Once the refresh is complete, the bar resets to full.

Overall, I think that this design solution works. The biggest question I have is whether users will quickly understand that the last update time is not necessarily the same as the last refresh time.

Read the Boston Globe Article

When I look at the iPad I don’t see the computer I’ll buy this year (though I might). I see the computer my kid(s) will take to college in 20 years. I see the video games we’ll play in 5 years. I see the magazines I’ll read when traveling on high speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 10 20 30 40 years.

Many call the iPad evolutionary, and indeed it is. It’s an iPhone with a bigger screen and faster CPU. Don’t believe me? Download the SDK.

What the iPad predicts for the future of computing however, is revolutionary indeed.

By default the mini-status bar appears on the bottom-left of the browser. This is almost always just fine and I never ran into an edge case where that position would be problematic, until today.

Hovering over a link very low on the page I noticed that the mini-status bar jumped to the right side. Brilliant! If this didn’t happen then the status bar would overlap the mouse and obscure the link being hovered. I realize that it’s easy in hindsight to say “duh, of course it should work this way” but it seems that this level of design attention is often overlooked, especially in beta software.

This is not news, you can read about the connection between Google’s phone and their services all over the place. What I wanted to add to the conversation is the email below. Getting to the office this morning I found this message with tips and tricks. The email is a nice touch, showing that Google put thought into designing not just the device but the touchpoints a new user has with Google elsewhere.

2009 Cycling Stats

4 organized rides (same as 2008)
46 individual rides (2 more than 2008)
1,579 miles (96 more than 2008)

I’m stoked to add Maui, Hawaii to a list of states ridden. While I’m not sure if I’ll rent a bike every time I visit the islands, I’m enjoyed the experience and am happy to have it one my cycling “resume”.

Oh, and in March I battled some nasty weather to watch a stage of the 2009 Tour of California along with some friends. That’s me cheering on Lance.

As I thought, I’m pretty behind last year’s schedule. Only 25 versus 39 individual bike rides and 919 versus 1264 miles.

There’s clearly something wrong with Garmin’s data as there is no way that riding on the same terrain garnered me more elevation this year. The problem is that they are STILL migrating from MotionBased and much of the elevation (and GPS) data is still missing from my account.

Chris Harrelson remembers taking the Franklin Line commuter rail from Norfolk into Boston at age 10, seeing the intense green of passing lawns and watching fall leaves turn copper and red outside the window. “I loved riding that train,’’ he says. “The way it moved seemed sort of magical.’’

So when Harrelson joined Google as an engineer almost two decades later and saw a demo version of Google Maps that calculated driving and walking directions, he was struck by what was missing from the program: public transportation.

Read the full article…

In just a week I’ll be riding 100 miles in the LIVESTRONG Challenge. I’m doing this to raise money for cancer research and patient support. I’m also doing it for Mom.

Just $20 will put me over my fundraising goal. Can you spare a few bucks? Thanks!

Read more…

I am really excited about this particular project and unlike many where the consultants must be quiet about the work, this client is more than happy to let us talk about it. You can expect to see a lot of iPhone design & dev related blog posts and tweets from me over the next couple of months.

“Placemaker is not a geocoder and does not perform street-level address recognition; it is however a geo-extraction and indexing tool designed to help determine the ‘whereness’ of a document or atomic unit of text. It provides the geographic developer community with the means to mark-up and index their content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner, and assists with geographic discovery and aggregation across the Internet.”

Send Placemaker the text “San Francisco” and you get back the city, state, Where on Earth ID and latitude/longitude. Feed the service a web page, like the CNN.com homepage and you get back a list of all places found on that page. Now, just to clarify, the locations returned by Placemaker are not addresses, but cities, states, countries and points of interest like parks, schools and landmarks.

I found this to be a fascinating concept. What could this service do for me? What could I build as a way to test the power of Placemaker? Well, a couple days later I am introducing a working version of mapZING.

About mapZING

mapZING is an incredibly small prototype that injects itself into any web page. A little window displays on top of the page’s content with a map marking all of the places found. Here’s a screenshot of the app on top of the CNN homepage.

How does it work? Simply add this mapZING link to your browser by dragging it to the toolbar or by right-clicking and saving as a bookmark/favorite. Next, go to a web page that has some location info on it. Good candidates I found are news sites, the Wikipedia homepage and local sites like for my home town.

The White House is pretty good too!

How to use mapZING

1. Drag this mapZING link to the bookmarks/links toolbar or right-click and save as a bookmark/favorite.
2. Go to a web page with location information.
3. Click on the mapZING bookmark to all of that page’s places on a map

Note that large web pages (over about 50,000 characters) are not allowed to sue the Yahoo! Placemaker service and there’s a surprisingly large number of pages that you’ll find rejected for this reason. I found in my testing that size was the most likely problem.

How I built it

Over the course of just a few days, poking at this idea when I had time, I was able to build a small working prototype app. There’s a lot of clean up to do and improvements I’d like to add. You can read more about the code behind mapZING in detail. I wanted to expose all of my code to 1) force me to do a better job 2) be humble about about my work and 3) allow others to learn where possible.

Like it? Hate it? Found a bug? Have ideas for improvements? Let me know in the comments!

In case you are testing mapZING on this page, here’s some place data:

• San Francisco
• San Ramon
• Coit Tower
• Golden Gate Bridge
• Oakland
• San Jose County
• Powell Street Station
• UC Berkeley

This is from the Wente Criterium in Livermore

MX 2008 | Margaret Gould Stewart from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

The design at Google drama started with a farewell letter from Doug Bowman. Doug was one of the first visual designers to join the ranks of Google. He also designed Blogger and Adaptive Path’s site. In Doug’s post, he didn’t necessarily say that the engineering focus at Google put design in the back seat (though many could interpret it that way). What he noted was a recurring theme of design by data. Design expertise, Doug explains, was often discounted in place of data that supported a particular design direction. This drove a talented designer to leave what one can only assume was a lucrative gig at Google.

Next came a rebuttal of sorts from Graham Jenkin. As a peer to Doug, he saw many of the same things within Google’s hallowed halls, but came away with a different perspective. Graham notes that Doug’s post “contains many truths” but his experience has been quite different. Partnering with product management and engineering is a must for success, says Graham.

The final post I read was a series of short letters written by Kevin Fox. Kevin was a designer who chose to leave Google for greener pastures at FriendFeed. In the post, he directs a message to Doug Bowman, to Google UX, Google Execs, Google Engineers and PMs, the Blogosphere and Google Users. The post questions Doug’s argument, praises Google UX and warns us meddling outsiders to be careful how much credence we give these shallow glimpses into Google’s operations.

All in all, I just really enjoyed reading these blog posts. They were very well written, and very honest. Each had a different perspective and I feel that as a whole, I have a slightly better idea of what designing inside of a large, successful company like Google is like. Mostly, I am just curious to learn more about design at Google.