• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 30, 2014

Hey bud, wanna get high? There's an app for that.

There is actually a pretty darned good app for that. In fact, the Leafly guide to all things cannabis is among the most adept mobile translations of a deep Web site I have seen lately. No, really, man. I am cold sober here.

It has been decades since I took my last toke, and man have things changed. There were only a handful of distinctions most by us made back in the college days of 1978. Sensimilla was about the only label we knew, even if we didn't understand its meaning (no seeds). It came down to “good sh**t” and “bad sh**t” really. And you could tell the difference mainly by the number of seeds that rolled down into the fold of your Pink Floyd album cover when sifting the buds.

Pick up the new iteration of the pot connoisseur's Leafly app on the iPhone and you will find a horticultural catalog of over 600 strains with 57,000 user-generated reviews. We are in an entirely different era of pot connoisseurship.

The guys who made Leafly must have come down from their high long enough to craft this app. It is a model of design, concise information, utility. Color tiles signify strains with abbreviations for things like Grandaddy Purple and Lemon Haze. It cleverly mimics the look of a Periodic Table, but with weed as elements. Each strain has several images, user reviews, an icon-driven index of flavor notes (“skunk” among them) and a cool tabbed bar chart that visualizes the effects, medical uses and negatives for each. Apparently there is pot porn. Aficionados enjoy looking at buds. The magazine High Times, for instance, has a surprising 107,000 Instagram followers, mainly looking at buds.

In short, it is clear that a lot of people have been smoking tons of weed to amass such a comprehensive database. And of course, Leafly is eminently mobile-aware. It will find your nearest purveyor of fine cannabis. 

The Learn section has two tabs to open news and a rich trove of background information. There is a great pop-up filter for the content to find categories of information. And there are loads of article tags for easy cross-navigation. I also like the nice balance here between visual and text. The app makes great use of icons and data visualization in combination with descriptive information.

Who would have guessed that an app about pot would be better than many news and most branded apps. But publishers could do a lot worse than mimic some of the design and editorial decisions made by Leafly. They have deftly translated a full Web site of information and reference material into an app that balances depth and efficient visual communication of information. It reminds me a USAToday for stoners.

It even has a recommendation engine to find similar strains. In other words, if you like this high, man, you gotta try this sh**t. No, really, man, you gotta try this. No, man, look at me, really, I am not sh**ting you man. Seriously, you gotta try this. What are you laughing about, man, I am serious.