Photo credit Tattfoo from the Nature Matching System project.

I’m building an iPhone app that lets you know what’s in season in your state.  It’s a simple idea and a simple app, that hopefully has a use to people.  I was inspired by a chapter in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” that talked about the benefits of becoming aware of the way food comes to you, and how the benefit of that awareness is knowing when and where to get the tastiest, best, fruits and vegetables at the time of year that they are freshest, need to travel the least, and are the more environmentally friendly.

The Home Screen: what’s currently in season in your state?

After a week of work, I’ve gotten most of the data normalized and have set up the basic structure of the information on the iPhone.  I’m trying to think of the best ways to display the information that I have… for example, from this screen above, I know how much longer a particular food will be in season, but what’s the best way to display that information?  Would it be more or less helpful to show a food’s full year of availability than to only show how much longer it was in season?  I think, in this case, that showing less information is going to be better.  We really only need to know how much longer carrots will be in season and don’t really care at the moment when it will be in season again.

Another question to consider.  Is it important at all to have the food sorted by name?  Or should it be sorted by how much longer it will be available?  Should the app encourage you to take advantage of foods that are going out of season soon over foods that are available all year round?

Food Detail Page

Then there’s the food detail page to consider.  At a bare minimum, it will display the name of the food, a picture, and the states in which it is currently in season.  However, should I use the fact that I know which state you’re currently in to highlight how many miles a particular item would have to travel to get to you?  Would that information even be accurate?

I’m going to add a way to leave notes about a particular food.  Perhaps commenting on its actual availability in a given season, from a given part of the country.  This information could be shared with others in your area, and around the country.

Other things I’m considering:

• Being able to favorite a particular food
• Seeing a Google Map that visually displays the states that its currently available in
• Links to online info?  Wikipedia?  Some other resource?  What kind of information would be useful to know?  Nutrients?  Shelf-life?

Notifications

The other feature I’m really excited about is to allow people to register their email addresses so that they can get notifications when food is coming into season or going out of season.