Live data from Hacker News

Fog of World

fogofworld.com

71–80 of 160 posts

Re: Fog of World

#71
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Congratulations, you have turned a peaceful and enjoyable experience into a slot machine. So don't use it?

well obviously. But I want others to see gamification for what it really is. The decision to use gamification in your products is similar to the decision to add fiberglass to cigarettes in the mid 20th century. Executives at tobacco companies didnt think it was bad, they just knew it would increase profits. Obviously this app does not have the same scope as cigarettes. But slowly more and more products/games are movi…

For the record (and while I know it's beside the point you were making), the "adding fiberglass to cigarettes" claim is pure bullshit.

See the Snopes article on the subject: http://www.snopes.com/business/alliance/menthol.asp

Re: Fog of World

#72

Thank God this costs $5 dollars. I might have even gone as high as $10. To all those that think 5 bucks is too much: for you to actually get any value out of this app you have to use it over a non-significant portion of your life. We're talking on the timescale of years; I find it hilarious that 1 dollar is fine but 5 whole dollars is outrageous.

So it's just an app that keeps track of where you've been?

Re: Fog of World

#73

This is totally going to be cool for use while riding my bike to work. I've been toying with the idea of exploring new paths on my 11 mile commute and this gives me a way to map them all out and the incentive to do so.

you should check out mytracks from google https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

might be more appropriate for what you're looking for

Re: Fog of World

#75

Correction — "Know the Area You Have Explored Around the World, Around A Continent, Or Even Around A Country, Where Your Phone Had A Full Battery, GPS Was Available, And There Was Reliable Electricity For Recharging!" This is dumb. Any given user is going to have massive holes in their map, which, at least according to my experience, will be the best parts of their trips — the parts where they didn't have their phone…

All this boring travel you disdain encompasses 95% of tourism spending. It may be boring to you, but it's hard for me to get mad at a product that targets a market that huge.

Re: Fog of World

#76
Is this specific to iOS5 and later? I long ago was very interested in something like this, but at the time (iOS3...) my understanding was that Apple didn't allow apps running in the background collecting data.

Re: Fog of World

#77

Correction — "Know the Area You Have Explored Around the World, Around A Continent, Or Even Around A Country, Where Your Phone Had A Full Battery, GPS Was Available, And There Was Reliable Electricity For Recharging!" This is dumb. Any given user is going to have massive holes in their map, which, at least according to my experience, will be the best parts of their trips — the parts where they didn't have their phone…

All this boring travel you disdain encompasses 95% of tourism spending. It may be boring to you, but it's hard for me to get mad at a product that targets a market that huge.

95% of existing tourism spending. There's a big untapped market out there.

Re: Fog of World

#78
post #56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% of the world is a lot of travelling and expenses for a $1 payoff.

Reversely, paying 1$ in not much when you'll be travelling 25% of the world. In my very basic example it was 20 000$ payoff for travelling 25% of the world. Let's make it 1 000 000$. I'm still winning. Covering 25% of the world's surface is almost impossible. Yet, with my app idea, people would have most probably paid for taking the 1$ challenge (i.e. paying 1$ to participate, winning 1M$ for being the first to achie…

Are you going to go through with it? I'm looking for a good excuse to just gtfo of dodge for a while

Re: Fog of World

#79
I love everything about it except the gamification. They were really onto something inspiring, and then I got to the part about achievements and leaderboards. Beyond a certain audience, that's patronizing, and it undermines anything more serious you're trying to do (c.f. "your whole life journey").

Re: Fog of World

#80

This looks really nice. I recently switched to Android (which, in my mind, with version 4.1 finally is able to compete with iOS in smoothness/stability while vastly surpassing it in features and usability), so I'm hopeful for an Android version. An Android version would also bring added benefits of smarter/less battery intensive background operation which could make this run all the time. Constant GPS-monitoring like…

* An Android version would also bring added benefits of smarter/less battery intensive background operation which could make this run all the time. Constant GPS-monitoring like Latitude or this seems to run way better on Android for some reason. * I'm curious, what makes you think this would more power efficient on Android?

This is purely speculative, but I think there are a couple of reasons why apps like this runs better on Android.

I think it mainly boils down to the fact that app developers on Android have much more freedom than on iOS, for example - instead of having to run the whole app in the background they can just run a small daemon. Android apps don't resort to weird workarounds, like in regular intervals doing something that requires some CPU power, in order to not get autokilled/paused like inactive apps often are on iOS.

On Android they can also do stuff like only using the GPS (which is very battery intensive) if they notice that the cell phone antenna/wifi reception is changing (indicating that you're not standing/sitting still) while GPS background logging on iOS requires constant GPS-logging.

Limits like that makes iOS use way more battery for background location tracking, in my experience at least. Another reason may be simply that Android phones tend to have larger batteries (in mAh) than iPhones do (the iPhone 5 has a 1440mAh battery, the Samsung Galaxy S3 has 2100mAh battery).

While the iPhone 5 is generally more power efficient than the S3 (due to slower CPU with less cores, smaller display and a more optimized OS), I'd imagine that their GPS chips uses approximately the same power, draining the iPhone battery faster since it simply has less power stored.

Post reply on HN