I know what you are thinking…hey this is the same Yelp Grub Finder app sans the Yelp…yea, sorry everyone…no more Yelp branding except for their required logos…as per Yelp…anyways, for those who are not familiar with my old Yelp Grub Finder, “Grub! on the go…” is an iPhone app that lets you search for food, beer whatever while you are on the go…it also provides review snippets and ratings from Yelp users to help you make your decisions…I also moved the home of my app to http://www.grubonthego.com

I will keep the old link location on bodesigns.com for those who have my app added to your home screens on your iPhones, but the look and name will change to “Grub! on the go…”

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I got a call today from the head of BD at Yelp…I thought it was a call to discuss purchasing my Yelp Grub Finder app being that it is featured on Apple as a staff favorite, and have had 50K + traffic in a few short weeks, but it was quite the opposite. To my surprise, they want me to change it…bummer… Even though I am using their name properly as per their terms of service, they think that it still looks too much like an app they have created…i don’t know about that, i think it looks a lot better than any app they would create … anyways, I will be changing the name and styling for the Yelp Grub Finder…All of the functionality is still going to be the same, the only difference will be the name and colors…Stay tuned for the change…

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In this update I added in reviewers photos, names and links to their profiles on yelp…

Yelp grub finder

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This update contains a few UI tweaks along with the addition of two more reviews excerpts per business…next on my list is getting full reviews pulled down…i also fixed up the back button so it looks more like an iPhone app back button, and I also fixed up the call and map buttons … they are no longer simple text links that are way too tiny…

Yelp grub finder

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Just added in an auto complete drop down for locations…now when you start typing in the location text box a drop down will pop up with suggestions based on yelps list of most popular locations …you may have to clear your cache in safari to see the update…to do this click on the settings app on the home screen of your iPhone, then click on safari, and then at the bottom you will see clear cache…just click that and you are ready to go…

Yelp Grub Finder

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This is an update to my original Yelp Search Widget for the iPhone…I hated the UI for the original, so I decided to rework it…this is still a work in progress…my next steps are to use prototype and scriptaculous to add in sliding transitions between the search, business list, and full business post views…i also want to add in the ability to save favorite places…in any case, if you have an iPhone, enjoy…

Yelp grub finder

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Here is a link to a great article by Jim Ramsey about designing a web site for flow. 

“The way to make the complex feel painless is to design with flow in mind. By designing a site that is fluid and intuitive and inspires flow, you help new users get up-to-speed more quickly, reduce the chance that existing users leave your site to switch to another and create users that evangelize your site to other people. That results in more users, increased activity, and greater awareness of your site.”  

http://alistapart.com/articles/designingforflow 

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I spent the weekend researching stuff like best practices when it comes to accessibility, searchability, etc…yea i know fun stuff…anyways, in my search I came across this really cool text based web browser that runs in command line called Lynx which promises to really improve accessibility and searchability.

How you ask…Well Lynx is a text only web browser that: 1. Most people with disabilities use, and 2. doesn’t support images, javascript etc. All it does is display your site as text.

Why is this important?

Well first most search engines these days pay little attention to meta data because of how people and SEO companies have been abusing the use of meta data.  Now most search engines still do look at meta data but they do not weigh it as heavy as what is found in your site content. As search algorithms have gotten more complex, we have started seeing companies like google actually go through your pages and look for keywords in your content text, links, alt tags, etc. to use for website searches and ranking. So this means that most of the popular search engines view your site very similarly to Lynx.

And secondly, if people with disabilities use lynx or something similar for their web browsing, you want your site to also work with it. This means you have to test your site on it to see if your content makes sense in a pure text format….especially for those people who use absolute positioning and such to construct your page. You have to make sure to layout your HTML code in such a way that when it is displayed in pure text format in Lynx, it makes sense. You do not want your text to be incoherent and jumbled up because when you laid out your page, you popped your absolutely positioned elements willy nilly in your code because you know that your CSS will handle the positioning for you.

Why not just use the accessibility plugin for firefox when it comes to testing your site for accessibility?Well I have been using the firefox plugin for a while now, but it has never really helped me to really understand the importance of accessibility and how I can really improve on what is really important about accessibility…being both accessible and useful at the same time… Being able to just toggle on and off CSS and Javascript with a Firefox plug-in just really doesn’t cut the mustard for me. Any site can be tweaked to be accessible to people with disabilities, the challenging part is to give those people the same level of user experience that everyone else gets out of the site. 

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This is a great little article I stumbled across on UX design for product pages by Amy Hoy. Check it out… Product Pages: So Much Suck, So Easy to Fix …it is good stuff…

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I am researching the best way to create scalable web pages, so when a user with special needs increases the size of their fonts, the entire page UI does not break…especially when you start adding in round corner tricks to divs…I have used other tricks in the past, but they all seemed a little hacked, so I am seeing if their is anyone else out there that does it better….

Then I found it….Yahoo.com! Check it out…when you go to yahoo.com and start scaling up your fonts you will see that every element on the page scales, not just the text. So the end result is a smooth scaling, non breaking layout where everything scales up at the same rate…so basically the page zooms. It is awesome.

The only problem now is to figure out how the hell they do it.

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