Botany Buddy

Twitter can wear me out sometimes.  I am a little to ADD to keep up with everything that is going on in all those different directions.  There are some wonderful people out there that I have gotten to know and I am a better person for it.  Let’s face it though, many of them are as fake as they come, especially when in the form of some tweet machine or corporate face.  The odd’s aren’t much different than in the world of touchable, seeable, smellable beings, but they are often more obvious, because it is easier to see behavior in print over a timeline than in a personal encounter.  Every once in awhile though you meet someone in the twitterverse that reminds you who you are and of your own timeline.

A few months ago I stumbled into one of those in @rainbowirisfarm.  It wasn’t anything I heard him say or do, but the few encounters I have take me deep into my roots unbeknown to him.  Rainbow Iris Farm is in a little known corner of the universe known as Bedford, Iowa.  You may be asking yourself how one can find the iris for the corn, and that can be hard.  However, also in Bedford is a little place called Lake of Three Fires.  There aren’t many big lakes in the land of tall corn, because it is just too damn flat to hold water.  This isn’t a big lake, but it had something even harder to find in the midwest.  It had a beach.

I grew up over the border in a little town in Northwest Missouri, and my parents split up at an early age.  Some of the fondest memories of times with my father involved two places…his rose garden, and Lake of Three Fires.  When my parents split up, it was during the gas crisis.  Mom got the Bug, and Dad got the MG.  At first I lived with my mom, and on visitation weekends with my dad, one of our favorite things to do was load up the MG and head to Bedford.  We would put down the roof and my brother would get the front seat because he was older.  I would sit in the back where there was no seat on the little flat space that the roof folded down into.  Sometimes I would even make a fort underneath the roof where I could nap out of the wind on the way home.

We knew the journey had begun, not when the roof came down, but when he popped in the Eagles Greatest Hits 8-track.   That giant orange toupee would start blowing in the wind with those giant silk collars and gold chains flapping to the wind in the same rhythm.  We new good times were ahead, including the drive.  When we would get to the lake, Dad always told us he couldn’t swim, but in reality it was just that the hair tape wouldn’t stay on in the water.  Decades later I can remember the sight of him on those trips vividly, but I can’t remember for the life of me what that lake looked like.  I can remember the rose garden vividly.  Every time I see @rainbowirisfarm in the timeline, I see that drive and even smell the Aramis like it was happening right then and there.  Then I go back down my own timeline and always end up in the rose garden.

With father’s day weekend coming up I will be going to the rose garden at Biltmore for a leisurely photo outing.  I recently did photo profiles of every rose in the place.  That was an even bigger journey through time than my twitter encounters.  Ominously missing from the collection is a certain Mr. Lincoln.  Rose gardeners will know what a travesty this is.  I started to wonder if the absence it was a nod to the South then I realized that Peace and Olympiad were missing too.  Maybe Mr. Vanderbilt just had something against symbols of democracy polluting his aristocracy.  Regardless,  I will go and inevitably get lost in the sights, smells and memories of times past.  I might even go all the way and put The Eagles on my iPod Touch.  They rightfully deserve a place there with Botany Buddy since my memories of them are much a part what has brought it about.   Now if I could just get just get that MG since I no longer need a truck.

As we anxiously await Apple’s approval of a major update,  I have definitely been lax on my blogging, tweeting and being  “network social”.  In part this is due to a major surge of activity on our web app, but also due to the wealth of photos that can be taken at this time of year.  With heavy fog in the mountains this morning, and a glitch with the database I thought I would take this down time to give you a preview of what is to come in the update.  We did have to make one adjustment after our first submittal in late May, but were able to resubmit the same day on the 2nd of June and hope to be approved soon.

700 new plants have been added to the database.  These additions come from our growing private collection, the University of Arizona Arboretum, as well as Oregon State University.  With this trio we have been able to capture a few more key items from the west.  Our headquarters in Asheville has been able to greatly expand our Eastern offerings, and with UA involved, we have been able to move into hundreds of tropical plants, cactus, and agave.

Three new advanced filters have also been added to the advanced search to make this happen.  Cactus and Succulent have been added as “Leaf Types”, and Rosette has been added as a “Growth Habit”.  This allows us to work with our existing format and bring these additional plants which might otherwise require a separate app.  This app will still be limited to trees and shrubs due to the number of plants required to adequately cover them.  We still feel that accuracy and quality have to be take priority over diversity.  We are seeing with other apps that it is still better to keep herbaceous and woody plants separate than try to do both in one app.  It just takes way too much space  and do them both justice without overloading the operating system or taking up all of the device memory.

5000 additional photos have been added to the app  bringing the total close to 10,000.  While many of these are for new species, a substantial portion are to provide more detailed botanical information.  Especially on the species level we are adding numerous photos of buds, leaf and flower structure, bark, and more to aid in identification during the down times of year.  Many of the varieties are moving from 3-5 photos to as many as 10-20.  This detailed morphological information has been a major request of educational users and well as naturalists trying to identify in the field.

Browsing within photos has been added to help navigate this extra content.  No longer will one have to go back to the plant profile to select a photo to look out.  Once a photo is opened, you will now be able to browse all of the photos within any plant profile using two new arrows at the top of the photo screen.  This becomes extremely useful when you are dealing with 10-20 photos for one plant.

Pinch and zoom has been added to all of the photos in the application.  Originally we left this out due to photo and total app size, but as users and Apple are becoming more accustomed to larger apps we have increased the file sizes with a goal of allowing you to zoom 3-4 times while retaining clarity.  Most photos that we take in house exceed a  24 x 36″ format so needless to say, we re-size them to maximize your device screen, memory and the speed of the operating system.  All of our full sized photos will eventually be available on our web based platform that we hope to have ready this summer.

One Touch Browse has been added to the search screens.  Many people have had difficulty searching by letter or name so now we have added a “Browse” button to all of the search screens that will load the entire library from A-Z.  Of course you will still be able to view the results by common or botanical name using the sort buttons at the top.  It can take about 30 seconds for this to load, but keep in mind the device is processing over 2000 results and almost 10,000 photos.  To let you know it is working you will notice an indicator that let’s you know it is sorting.

An A-Z Slide Bar has been added to all results screens to help you sort through the results.  As a simple browse generates 2000 results, you can imagine it would be cumbersome to slide the screen hundreds of times to get to the bottom.  You will now find an A-Z bar on the right hand slide of the screen that will allow the user to slide down the whole library rather than just what is on the page.  There are also letters on the bar so you can touch on just the letter you want to go to.  As someone who has opened all 30,000 screens on the app over ten times, this is one of my most used new additions.

A Library Update Interface has been created by our developer to allow me to add plants and make library edits at any time without having them to import the data.  This is a back house item that will allow me to directly add plants to the app database on a more regular basis.  It will also give me greater control over accuracy that can get shuffled with data imports.  We will still have to submit updates to Apple in batches and cannot add them directly to your device without their approval.  However, this will allow us to add things in smaller batches on a more frequent basis, making it much easier  to meet your needs on a timely basis.  In fact, we have already accumulated hundreds of plant profiles and thousands of photos since I submitted the last 700 plants to the developer.  As soon as Apple gives us a green light I will be diving into this new tool.

There are other minor changes you will find throughout the app.  Some of the photos have been rearranged for easier comparisons, some data updates have been made and other little geeky stuff.  Even since this update, we have received some nomenclature updates from the International Taxonomic Index System (ITIS).  This is the kind of stuff we created the back of house tool for.  As our regular readers know, we are committed to creating the best tools and information possible and as part of this update we will be able to provide it much faster.  In many ways, this feels like a completely new app to me, and it is hard to call it an update as it is more of a new version.  Regardless, after a year of building and using it, when I need information it is starting to feel like an old friend.