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April 6, 2011#

Getting over FourSquare

Photo Apr 05 11 03 33 PM

When FourSquare came out of location Beta and was available to the world, I was excited to participate in the location sharing app. One of the things that appealed to me when It came out was the leaderboard functionality, it became a game to me to start blanketing the city and creating check-ins for businesses and rack up the most points and try and top the leaderboard every week. Fast forward to 15 months later, almost every location in town has a foursquare checkin.

It was also a challenge to me to become the mayor of the places that i frequented, sometimes making sure I checked in before my wife had a chance to so I could steal the mayorship from her.

Then one day, I changed something. Extremely busy that day, my phone would not stop lighting up due to foursquare notifications. I turned off the notification feature and from that point on, I’ve forgotten about foursquare. I still use if on events that are important to me, but not for my everyday life events. I mean really, does anybody care that I am the mayor of Shopper’s Drug Mart? Shoppers doesn’t. I don’t feel the need to check in when I stop into a store to buy milk, nobody cares, why do I have to document this?

Foursquare notifications became like white noise to me, I didn’t care who was where, I always dismissed them when they popped up, but it was a constant reminder to me that I needed to participate in the game as well.

I think that location based apps are great, and can serve a great purpose to a business owner, but in London, Ontario there are very few businesses if any who reward the mayor with any kind of recognition. So what does being the mayor of Henry’s camera get me… nothing. You don’t care, Henry’s doesn’t care, it was for bragging rights i guess, but I don’t really care anymore.

I’m not abandoning foursquare anytime soon, I’m just going to use my checkin’s sparingly and for locations/events that I want to share that I’m attending.

March 7, 2010#

My Oscar Picks 2010…

I just made my 2010 Oscar Predictions! Make yours with the Official Oscar iPhone App.

Music (Original Score): Up, Michael Giacchino WON
Animated Feature Film: Up, Pete Docter WON
Costume Design: Nine, Colleen Atwood NO
Writing (Original Screenplay): The Hurt Locker, Written by Mark Boal WON
Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side WON
Visual Effects: Avatar, Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham and Andrew R. Jones WON
Cinematography: Avatar, Mauro Fiore WON
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker, Bob Murawski and Chris Innis WON
Sound Mixing: Avatar, Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson and Tony Johnson NO
Art Direction: Avatar, Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair WON
Best Picture: Avatar, James Cameron and Jon Landau, Producers NO
Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart WON
Documentary (Feature): The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Fisher Stevens WON
Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker, Paul N.J. Ottosson WON
Makeup: The Young Victoria, Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore NO
Actress in a Supporting Role: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air NO
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds WON
Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon, Germany NO
Documentary (Short Subject): China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill NO
Music (Original Song): The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart), from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett WON
Writing (Adapted Screenplay): In the Loop, Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche NO
Directing: Avatar, James Cameron NO

itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id354102052

January 28, 2010#

RimRoller. My first iPhone app.

Last year during Tim Horton’s Roll Up the Rim contest, I started to post by results to my twitter account after each rim i rolled up.  It started with a very dismal 0-18 record, finally winning around my 20th coffee.

After each post, I tagged my tweet with the hashtag #rolluptherim.  Turns out, I wasn’t the only one:

From the National Post:

“Each year, the waning of winter means many things to many Canadians: the NHL trade deadline, last-minute dashes to the slopes, and the crisp sound of rolling coffee cup rims.

It’s quite likely that over the past week, you or someone close to you, has participated in the nation’s favourite contest: Tim Horton’s Roll Up The Rim To Win.

In the old days, if your rolling turned up a winner, you’d simply just high-five your buddies, or do some sort of happy dance in the middle of your local Timmys.

However, in these modern times, aside from practicing your rolling skills online you can celebrate your winnings and vent your frustrations via Twitter.

Using the hashtag #rolluptherim, Twitter users across the nation are keeping a tally of their winnings and failures with the contest.”

With this years contest coming at the end of February, I decided that it would be a good opportunity for myself to learn the iPhone SDK and go through the app development process.  I was interested in doing a quick test project to learn some basic functions and social networking integration, as I am about to develop a full scale application that will be a very large iPhone/iPad app.

So, here it is.  RimRoller, my first iPhone/iTouch application.

The idea behind the application, is pretty simple:

Enter you twitter login info
Buy a Coffee
Roll up the Rim
Press either the win or lose button in the app

After this is done, it keeps a tally of your Win/Loss ratio, and posts an update to twitter stating if you won or lost and your current win/loss ratio.

This is a very 1.0 release with a very crappy UI.  I just wanted to get something out to market in time for the 2010 Roll up the Rim contest.  In future releases, I plan on including Facebook connect, and the ability to specify what exactly you won.

Sticking with a quote that i read recently, “If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough” The RimRoller app was conceived, programmed, and released on the App Store in 8 days time.

Download RimRoller here.

Resources i used during the app development: