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Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

missionlab.posterous.com

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Re: Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

#21

Post by geuis »

ish_ish wrote: post #17
geuis wrote: post #15

Let this be a lesson to anyone working on a product. I've been building an app that does exactly the same thing for the last couple of months. You have to be first to market.

Hey -- neither of us is first to market on this one. I found out of others even as I was building it. I almost gave up but then figured I might as well go for it. I address this in the post -- the market it young and is ripe for plenty of products.

I wish you good luck with the app. Honestly, I started building mine because I keep running into situations where I need something like this. I was scratching my own itch, as it were.

Re: Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

#22

Post by dirtyaura »

Great article. His observations of location polling strategies and battery life are spot on, so if you are interested in location-based services, read them carefully. When developing Jaiku Mobile (always-on rich presence sharing with location and other data) we learned same things.

There's actually two strategies that you've to manage: polling of the location (GPS usage) and sending it to the server (network usage). In 3G, there is a significant energy consumption cost, when you send small amount of data regularly to server, because the network stack has to be changed to higher-energy mode each time you send something over TCP/IP.

Even if you stay in a same location and the location data doesn't changed, you might need to send the data to server. Why? To indicate freshness of the data, server has to pinged to indicate that location data is still fresh, even if it hasn't changed. Indicating data's freshness can be important in tracking situation (e.g. Geoshare).

Re: Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

#25

Post by T_S_ »

geuis wrote: post #15

Let this be a lesson to anyone working on a product. I've been building an app that does exactly the same thing for the last couple of months. You have to be first to market.

No you don't. Not even Facebook was first. I like to call it validation.

Ever notice how a lot of web pages used to suck. Nowadays a lot of apps are like that (present app excepted :-). Keep going!

Re: Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

#26

Post by akulkarni »

Awesome, well-thought post by a clear veteran.

"With GeoShare I was consistently fighting against myself not to add more features that I knew would be useful. This was a difficult thing for me to resist since I myself used the product daily and had a sense what I wished it could do. But they say if you're not embarrased by your first product then you waited too long."

'nuf said.

Re: Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

#27

Post by lawrence »

ish_ish wrote: post #17
geuis wrote: post #15

Let this be a lesson to anyone working on a product. I've been building an app that does exactly the same thing for the last couple of months. You have to be first to market.

Hey -- neither of us is first to market on this one. I found out of others even as I was building it. I almost gave up but then figured I might as well go for it. I address this in the post -- the market it young and is ripe for plenty of products.

glympse? Ish, would like to connect with you. we build geo apps, and work out of the mission (in the us bank building on 22nd and Mission).

Re: Building a location based iPhone App: from idea to my first users

#30

Post by alexbell »

jmtame wrote: post #5

does anyone know why the default location is cupertino in the ios simulator? i want to think it's because of speed (why take time to find your location during each run?), but i'm starting to wonder if it's because the difficulty in getting an accurate location lock on a wifi network for example. i've found that detecting geolocation on a non-mobile device such as a laptop (even using the latest w3c navigator.geolocat…

I believe the simulator can also do location by wifi if possible.
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