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 turned on and didn't care, because it didn't matter.
The problem with all of these dumb travel apps for smartphones is they only seem to be geared toward people who travel with defined itineraries, pay money for accommodation and travel, and only travel in more developed, predictable places. In other words, the most boring kind of travel.
Vayable is the only company I've seen trying to make money from adventurous travel, but even then, it's for purchasing adventurous travel for people who can't find it on their own.
And I still can't find a reasonably good offline maps app for Android, for when access to the Internet isn't so easy.
People turn their phones off? We must know different people because everyone I know has their phone switched on all the time.
Not all travel has to be to wilderness, there's just as much enjoyment to be had in visiting regular places, not just middle if nowhere kind of places. They might be boring to you, but that's a very narrow kind of thinking to assume that of others.
And unless you're spelunking, there's a very good chance that GPS is available. It's designed for the military, so reliability and accessibility are important. There are very few places on the earth that cannot see enough satellites to get a decent fix.
Not all developed countries are boring! It's just as much of a jungle in NYC as it is in any South American rain forest.
Hi, I'm Jason. I don't generally even carry my phone around with me. It sits plugged into the wall most of the time (often switched off), unless I'm going out and know that I'll need to meet up with people.
Now you know me.
Incidentally, I spend an awful lot of my year traveling in places where my phone wouldn't get any signal, were I to switch it on. I think this app would work a lot better for somebody backpacking around Europe than banana boating down the Amazon.
A dedicated GPS logger is what you need. You just need a device smaller than your hand and some room for the charger in your backpack. You can import them back to the app later.
You don't need an internet connection to get a GPS fix, so this app would work fine anywhere I think. You then need internet connectivity to sync your accumulated lat/long data back to your account.
>I think this app would work a lot better for somebody backpacking around Europe than banana boating down the Amazon.
The former may be the exact people the makers are targeting. For instance, my parents usually go on 'package tours' where a travel company takes them around in a group; usually its to Europe, AU etc.
I agree. Just because your definition of travel is apparently centered around outdoorsy activities that take you far away from civilization doesn't mean that there aren't other reasons to travel that are just as viable, but not nearly as desolate. I for example, prefer to spend my time in big cities. That just happens to be what I like. If I were to take a trip to Tokyo, I would want to spend a lot of my time eating at Japanese restaurants, meeting new people and hanging out at Japanese bars, and just experiencing what life is like for the average person who lives there. And honestly, for that sort of travel, this service could be really cool.
On another level, it's even useful for finding the parts of a city you've never seen before. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life, and have begun to find it very boring, but perhaps if I were to unlock parts of the city that I didn't realize I'd never been to before, I could make some interesting new discoveries and keep myself entertained without even having to travel!
Now that is a feature. I'd happily download my home town and run it offline always. Waiting for 3g cell reception to get the map to see where you're to go next is very tedious.
In addition to that, if you're traveling a route, you can (at least as of a few Android versions ago) cache the list-view directions as well (though obviously not the turn-by-turn as no signal means it might not know where you are).
It's a life saver if you're traveling through middles of nowhere.
A lot of you misinterpreted what I said. I'm not necessarily talking about being outdoors.
For example — this summer, I was travelling between Skopje and Belgrade. After hitch hiking the whole day to Skopje, my phone was dead. I only had 30 minutes in the train station to charge my phone, and electricity was not available on the train.
By the time I got to Belgrade in the morning, my phone was dead again, and charging it would have meant hunting down a cafe with outlets and wasting two hours waiting for it to charge.
At that point, it was easier to just ask people where stuff was than screw around with my phone to get maps working.
"Passive location" apps like this just add to that stress, because it's just draining your battery faster for marginal benefit. "Be a painkiller, not a vitamin" and all that.
I think there's a huge opportunity in web-connected paper maps for relieving travel stress. I know that's what I needed this summer.
Yes, well, unless your doing something dangerous like climbing Everest, any travel you do completely pales in comparison to the early world travelers who went from Europe to Asia or America. It must make you nearly suicidal to think how boring and mundane all your life experiences are in the context of history.
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.
A lot of seriously dedicated "off-the-beaten-track" types will have solar chargers for their iPhones (or whatever), GPS works everywhere except near US Military Bases.
I hope they've been judicious in their use of power while in the background. It seems like a cool idea to me. I can easily imagine simply trying to fill in the area I live in much the same way as I would explore nooks and crannies in dungeons maps.
I don't think so. I am a mountain climber and my phone is off and for emergencies only. It is not even a smart phone as they are way to vulnerable and consume to much energy to run.
A lot of seriously dedicated "off-the-beaten-track" types will have solar chargers for their iPhones (or whatever), GPS works everywhere except near US Military Bases.
Or just switch their phones off, unless they need help, if you are lucky enough to have reception. The "off-the-beaten-track" types that I know use paper maps, or a Garmin GPS that lasts two days while continually using maps on two AA batteries, that can handle occasional drops and water.
I like hiking every now and then, but do not really see use for this. What does it give me over uploading my tracks on the many 'show my last hike track' websites?
Besides that, I can really see this being harmful for nature, people destroying vulnerable plants and animals just to remove a particular piece of fog. It's as sad as people completely 'flattening' a some spot to find a particular Geocache.
(I do like responsible Geocaching, but people should be made aware of damage that they could make.)
And if you're talking about the Internet at all, that's not the point of serious backpacking, hiking, etc, that's your point.
For example, João Garcia, who reached the top of all the 14 highest mountains in the world (Everest, K2, Annapurna, etc) without an oxygen bottle, had an internet-connected GPS logger with him - a system which also happens to have an iOS app. Was he not "seriously hiking" because of that?
You can use a separate GPS logger to record your tracks and import them back to the app. GPS logger is usually small, light-weight, long batter life, and better in receiving GPS signal when there is no Internet connection. You just need a GPS logger and a charger. That's all.
I recommend RMaps for Android. There's an alternative version of Mobile Atlas Creator out there on the internets that makes map downloads from multiple sources like Google Maps, Bing Maps etc possible.
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.
Most apps are opened once, twice at most. A small percentage of apps downloaded are used at all after the first day on the user's device. A very few make it into daily use; and most of those are on the device the day it's purchased.
This is because most apps are not compelling experiences.
If you factor in the risk that this app, like most of the ones they have seen so far; will not be in their life for more than 10 minutes... I would say they are being rational in their pricing bias.
There are two ways around this. You can communicate your value ahead of time to your potential customers, which Fog Of World does fairly well. Or you can build a business model that has usage based pricing through in-app purchases, so that people who are regular users are paying their way.
Probably my most well-traveled friend is far from well-off. She just prioritizes travel over many other things in her life, like $5 mobile apps that don't solve any specific problem.
I think apprehension comes from never realizing $5 worth of value. Myself and others have come to spend money on many apps only to be dissapointed. Theres more times that I will use a free app and pay for the premium version after realizing the value. $1 is a simple impulse buy, $5 not as much.
I'm the creator of this app. I'd like to explain the idea behind this app a bit.
Our dream is to go around the world, so we create this geo/map/game hybrid app to remember everywhere we have been in our whole life time. We want to use the exploration map to memorize our entire life when we are old and unable to walk. We also use the map to find out places nearby where we live but we never know. We actually got surprised many times that we found a lot of new places around where we live but we hadn't been in the past ten years.
I visited Japan four years ago, but honestly, I really don't remember those places I had been at that time, except few really famous places. I don't even know what hotels I lived, what roads I walked that time. And that's why I build this app. Now I can see the map and memorize what happened at those places I had been.
The app is such a great idea, so I bought it immediately, but I have to say I'm disappointed. Much of my travel abroad happened when I was young. There were no smartphones, or GPS.
But I know plenty of the places I've visited, hotels I've stayed in, train routes I've ridden, etc.
I'd love a way to "paint" the fog away manually, and maybe tag that "painting session" with some metadata (dates, at a minimum, maybe photos, etc).
But what if the hotels aren't there anymore? All you'll know is that you have been at these geo-coordinates once.
I have the same plan for when I'm old, so I take pictures with my iPhone whenever I want to hold on to a moment (and taking a photo is convenient). The image quality may be crappy, but I end up with one more GPS-tagged picture on the world map. The iPad Photos app nicely visualizes this, before that I'd used iPhoto.
Maybe you could add support for this too and overlay it with the "fog of world"?
Even though the hotels aren't there anymore. We can still memorize the hotels we visited before. They are not there, so we can memorize, right?
Mapping photos to the exploration map is planned in future version, or even for a Mac version. But there are a couple of higher priority tasks we need to do before that, such as support for sync between devices.
Please do continue your work. I'm especially hopeful to get it as a desktop app for Mac. Thanks for building something really useful but not another social network. Please don't make it social, don't make it a SaaS. Something personal and local is so much better and comforting. (My another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=4592630)
I think it's a great idea. But to be persistent over my entire life, there really needs to be an export option so that when smartphones are no longer around and we got neural implants or something I can still make use of the data collected now.
Also 1% of the world seems impossible considering the line of sight when walking around. Even 1% of most countries is impossible.
Due to goal of this app is to save tracks over a person's entire life. The data is saved with super high level optimization. Thus it's impossible to export them to other services like Google Latitude.
However, we're working on database synchronization between different devices. Soon you will be able to sync your data between your iPhone and iPad through Dropbox (also for backup). We also have plan for a Mac version in the future, and due to the power of a desktop computer. Photo mapping or more options are expected to show along the fog map.
That's true it's almost impossible to explore over 1% of the world. So the app doesn't lie to you, right? Anyway, the app encourages people to explore more of the world, discover new places, and know more around where you live. Those numbers really do not matter. It's about your life, and you will know how many places (or area) you have explored in your whole life.
I think it's a fantastic idea. Will it work while the device is locked though, or do I have to walk around with my iPhone/iPad open all the time? The page doesn't really make that clear, and it's the most important decision factor for me since I'd want to just have it passively tracking in my pocket or backpack.
It works while the device is locked. However, to save battery life, locations will be reported every 40-50 meters when app is in background. Thus no fog will be removed if you only move a few meters.
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 Latitude or this seems to run way better on Android for some reason.
* 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?
It's quite simple: most iPhone apps just leave the GPS turned on 100% of the time when in the background, as it's complicated to do otherwise (or you can use the borderline-useless 'significant change' cell-tower location api's).
Android gives you the option of leaving it turned off for 10 mins, fire your app up for a minute, turn the GPS on, then turn it off again and go to sleep for 10 mins again. Huge battery savings. You can technically do this on iOS, but it's a challenge and kinda-sorta breaking the background running rules so big companies like google don't tend to do it in their apps.
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.
Foursquare's experience developing apps that use background location has been the exact opposite.
The iOS background location APIs are so restrictive precisely so that you can't drain the battery. The OS, which is running anyway, can listen for major changes in location and start your app only if the location change is relevant to your application.
On Android, your app has to be running in the background always, to constantly check for such changes itself, which significantly drains the battery. If several such apps are running...
> On Android, your app has to be running in the background always, to constantly check for such changes itself, which significantly drains the battery. If several such apps are running...
Strictly false. Your app may still have a daemon in the "running" state in the background, but Android supports the exact same "sleep until significant changes are detected by the OS" method that iOS uses. I have multiple applications that can take action of some form or another based on changes to my location, and unless I have my phone screen turned on and actively running the UI for those apps, they never even appear in the list of applications using the most battery.
We should have hints on titles like "Apple only" so we don't have to read for 5 minutes and then see that it was a total waste of time, having no Android version.
When I used to live in SF, I would always go on walks and explore the city. I found that it would take several visits before I could fully remember the details of a new route or area, but once I knew that place I would move onto a new area. This was enjoyable and I got to see the innards of a beautiful city.
Now this? Congratulations, you have turned a peaceful and enjoyable experience into a slot machine. Now rather than enjoying where I am, I can enjoy hearing my phone go DING! You will lose all connection to the places you go. Rather than rely on my own memory, which takes a few trips, I will just go to a neighborhood once, cross it off my checklist and probably never go back. Because going back wont give me the exp I need to level up and release endorphins.
Gamifaction is the public relations term for addiction.
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 moving towards this model. The AAA game industry very quickly adopted zynga-esque addiction mechanics rather than 'fun' mechanics.
edit: before I get downvoted for what might seem like a ridiculous comparison, let me give some context.
About a month ago, one of my favorite MMOs ever, and imo the greatest MMO ever made, Vanguard:SOH was changed from subscription to F2P by its owner SOE. VG:SOH is the deepest, most complex MMO ever created and has a huge world. However once it went F2P, SOE turned it into essentially a zynga game. It changed from an rpg to an item-driven grind fest (ie keep grinding these same quests and you can get epic loot). Then you can buy xp potions to make leveling go by faster. In short they turned it from a rpg into slot machine. With a consistent and easy path to get your endorphin bursts.
Now this isn't that different than what every other AAA game studio is doing to their games (except maybe Valve). The path is clear to them. The term gamification exists because non-game companies want to take advantage of this model. But what they don't understand is that they are making shallow, heartless products that guide you towards their goals rather than making something fun and enjoyable. In other words, the cigarette analogy is perfectly apt. Cigarettes have been made optimally efficient to cause addiction whereas previously they had just been an enjoyable experience and not nearly as addictive. Addiction profit is a gold mine.
In the case of vanguard, you don't have the option to have the old, ungamified, version. (Can a game not be gamified?) In the case of walking around, you can still do it the same way you always have, if you prefer. What's the problem here?
A game can be fun; it can be deep and complex...or it can be like farmville. The problem is that companies are moving in droves towards Farmville type products because addiction is more profitable. I would like this community, as the vanguard of tech development, to see that there is a problem with this.
Perhaps it fits yours, but not mine. I consider gamification as adding mechanisms to some other activity (such as participating in a community) to turn it into a game. While the idea was inspired by a game, I don't see any more "gamification" here than I do in keeping track of, say, how many friends one has on Facebook. There's no reward system, no leader boards. It's just a record of travel.
>I consider gamification as adding mechanisms to some other activity (such as participating in a community) to turn it into a game.
Perform action, receive reward, repeat, collect more rewards.
That in a lot of definitions is a game. Fog of World, you perform an action by travelling, unlock badges, repeat, collect more badges. That sounds like the very definition of gamification.
Not to pick a fight, but is there something specific about this product that you feel crosses the line? To me your complaint has a similar ring to Plato's on writing (http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/museum/plato.html). My point is that technologies such as this app have a long lineage, have faced similar complaints, and eventually the complaints disappear as we incorporate the technologies and move on. You might be right that a certain magic is lost, but overall the trend is strongly towards cognitive efficiency at the expense of magic. Or am I missing your point?
Thats why I made the 'get off my lawn' comment, because I know I was coming off as a bit of a crank :)
In response to evan_'s comment, I give an explanation that describes in a bit more detail why I feel gamification is bad in general. So the first paragraph I wrote was a 'the magic is lost' rant, and the second is an angry rant at gamification. I think it is bad and you can see in my other comment for a partial reason why.
I have nothing against this particular product other than the progress bars. If the magic is lost, its lost. But the addictive mechanics that are springing up in more and more web/mobile applications are a disturbing trend. We, the business class, have found out how to make slot machines cool and we're all slapping each other on the back as we make money hand over fist while turning countless customers into addicts.
(I dont believe this product will turn anyone into an addict and I may be making comments that seem extreme when taken out of context. This may be a deeper issue than can be discussed on a internet forum)
This is neat, I wish Google Latitude had it. For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it. =|
Right, it only lets you view up to 30 days at a time. I want to see it all at once, and I wouldn't even mind if it's just a messy pile of incomprehensible lines. Something like this fog of war idea would be even better, though.
That may be true but my response wasn't to compare it to the app. It was in response to For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it.
Latitude does have a useful visual representation. It also makes all the data available for you to do any other representation you'd like. See links in screenshot for downloading the data.
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").
Cool idea, but I think my life will be way longer than the lifetime of this app.
I think I could do something similar in an open format that will still be accessible in 50 years: an image of the world map, with an alpha channel that has pixels where I've been made opaque.
In fact, I did came up with this idea one year ago.
My idea was to cover the whole world with fog of war, and to make people team up to discover the world. There would be challenges, where you would pay like 0.50$ to participate, and then big reward for the first team achieving the challenge.
My idea was a free app with paying challenges. Uncovering 25% of the world ? $1 challenge, 20k$ reward. It's a really easy win. People tend to like these kind of idea, they would contact their friend abroad to team up with them, then pay to join the challenge, etc.
I finally decided, after 3months of thoughts, not to realize this project. It's currently impossible to rely confidently on geolocalisation data from any mobile device. People could cheat from iPhone dev. simulator, etc.
Well, kudos to people who did it ! Different from my idea, but anyway. Now that it's been done, I can finally explain the idea I had ! :)
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 achieve the goal).
To expand on my concept, there would have been teams, anyone could create a new team, creating teams would have been free, people could have joined as many team as they wanted.
It's easy to go viral on these stuff. Every participant would probably call their friend oversea to tell them to join their team on this particular challenge, i.e. paying 1$ with the 1M$ reward in sight. The reward would be splitted between participants of the winning team (pro rata the surface covered).
Uncanny. I can claim in true honesty that I had a remarkably similar vision for a comprehensive life 'experience quotient' app not even 2-3 weeks ago. The travel portion looked very similar: GPS enabled tracing of a global map space with percent coverage. But travel would be but one table in a comprehensive database of life experience: financial, relationships, science, arts, drugs, sex and everything else worth living for. An algorithm would tally a grand 'statistic'. It's the stuff of Borges' wildest fantasies, n'est-ce pas?
This is a wonderful idea. It would be really interesting if you could "ally" someone else to combine mini-maps. With this feature, you wouldn't just know where everyone has been, but you can also map their social graph!
In strategy games, there is a fog over areas where you have no vision (ie places you dont have any units that can see exactly what is happening at that moment). This introduces uncertainty and allows for more strategy based on positioning and vision.
While people have described this in regards to RTS games, I feel that it might be more appropriate to link it to RPG games where unexplored parts of the map are obscured by a fog until you visit them.
It's worth also noting that some gamers who are real completists love visiting every location to remove the fog, and there's often achievements linked to this.
In (particularly real-time) strategy games the map is often hidden or grayed out at the beginning of a match beneath a "fog of war". As you move your units around the map the area in their vision is revealed. This is particularly important as there may be enemies/objectives in sections of the map which are unexplored.
That's an incredible idea. I really wish it was available a desktop application though. Such an app could gather information from multiple sources (including companion mobile apps) and maybe even location-aware social networks. It's useful on a mobile phone but i would rather buy a dedicated gps device to track my progress as constant usage of gps on a phone will definitely decrease it's battery life. Also I really feel uncomfortable handling this kind of historical data to any sort of SaaS. I would definitely pay as high as $10 (or maybe even more) for something like that.
Couple of questions if anyone has bought it and can answer:
1) Extending the fog of war metaphor, do places gradually 'fade' or 'grey-out' or similar the longer you are away from the area? Or is it a case of once-seen always seen?
2) This seems great for the devices that have GPS, but I'm sceptical of it's value on say, my iPod Touch, which IIRC relies entirely on Wi-Fi triangulation.
(1) It's once-seen, always seen.
(2) You can use a separate GPS logger to record your tracks and import them back to the app. A dedicated GPS logger is usually small, light-weight, long battery life, and better for receiving GPS signal when there is no Internet connection.
I think this is cool, despite the fact that it will undoubtedly leave out some interesting experiences. However, it also serves as a visceral reminder of the kind of data being made available to third parties when using this type of app. It makes me want to create something similar which I and everyone else wishing to use it can then keep entirely to ourselves.
I love this concept, I already think about maps this way in my head, I'd love a way to externalize it!
Unfortunately though I don't want it on game center, I want it in some sort of open exportable data that I can access, perhaps make a widget for my website out of, or update from other devices.
I am always curious why when people say that $x.xx (or any app that is not $.99) is too expensive for an app.
A meal (burger, fries and a drink) in McDonalds will cost you at least $5~$9 depending on the size of the meal you get. Would you say that is expensive? Yet, when an app is anywhere from $2~$10, people will deem it as "expensive". It astounds me when people don't give a thought about spending $10 on food but when it comes to any software-related stuff, the same $10 is "too much".
There's a difference between buying food, a necessity, and an app, a luxury. And when you use your McDonald's example, you're assuming that the person you're conversing with is willing to pay $5-$9 for a meal at McDonald's. Many people who won't pay more than a buck for an app won't be spending more than a couple bucks on a meal at McDonald's anyway.
You only know what you are getting from McDonalds because you have bought it before, well what about your first time eating at McDonalds? You certainly did not know what you were getting then.
I suspect that for most people in the US their first meal at McDonalds was purchased by their parents. And they probably know quite a few people in real life that would endorse McDonalds.
That is a pretty much irrelevant point though, use any other example of buying a meal from somewhere that is not as common as McDonalds. On the point of endorsing, people can endorse an app as well so I am still not sure how that applies.
Whenever I see comments like this my first instinct is that their own products, if they have any, are priced too low.
The difference between 99cents and a higher price making the same profit is a significant difference in number of sales. Maybe if they get featured it would be worth it to lower the price to ensure it stays in the charts, but if it's not ranked it does not make sense to have a lower price.
People say what they wish for and then do another thing. People complain about prices, and then buy anyway if the product is right for them. And if the product is exactly made for them they will sense the value and know that the price is great. $5.49 for something you will potentially use for years? I have no trouble seeing the value. Though I only use Android devices.
It could, but that doesn't mean it will. It's a cool enough thing that people will talk about it.
I have done pricing experiments. For apps which are not ranked, and have no ads driving extra traffic, 99cents vs even $6.99 usually equals the same number of sales. Lower prices don't matter as much as people think they do. When you talk about risk, do you mean that you do not believe your social circle will find this interesting enough to even know about it? If you did then price wouldn't matter... have you ever recommended anything higher than 99cents to anyone? That 99cents is a popular price for "apps" does not matter. Devs should still charge more when it makes sense to.
Is there any way to get any existing data on the iphone into the app (preferably without too much pain)? I assume it's already logging my info: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
I bought the app and like it. Perhaps I have not discovered it yet but I would like to enter the places that I have been in the past. This would be for my own enjoyment and could be a different mode from the "game mode" which is based on actual GPS data.
Here's my suggestion - make the app free and sell users their data back in city map/country map/world map form, and link it to their vacation photos. That would be really awesome, and is totally possible with GPS in cameras now or with phone cameras.
don't know if it was just me but, with a name like fog of war, i thought this app was going to be "warcraft" in real-life. that would've been really cool.
In case the dev is reading these: typo in bullet 6 at bottom
>It is recommended to use a separate GPS device to record your tracks. This would save beattery life of your iOS device and avoid GPS signal loss when Internet connection is unavailable.
The app looks pretty great. Being able to incorporate the geolocation data from foursquare, instagram, flickr, facebook, etc. would aid in not feeling like you have to think of your traveling as starting when you downloaded the app.
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.
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.
The utility treats each checked-in locations as part of a track. But you don't actually follow the route to visit each places, right? That's why those locations won't be imported. You need to find a tool to convert those locations to tracks. Each track only contains one location. That will work.
This is revolutionary, I've always been a advocate of incorporating a gaming atmosphere into everyday activities. This is a great push in that direction!
When the REC button is red, the app start recording your locations (even in background). Make sure there are at least 3 GPS signal bars, or no locations will be recorded.
very cool, though that Explored Area status bar is probably going to be stuck at 0.001% (or less) for a while... I wonder what surface you "discover" when you're standing in place - I'm guessing around 300 m^2?
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 turned on and didn't care, because it didn't matter.
The problem with all of these dumb travel apps for smartphones is they only seem to be geared toward people who travel with defined itineraries, pay money for accommodation and travel, and only travel in more developed, predictable places. In other words, the most boring kind of travel.
Vayable is the only company I've seen trying to make money from adventurous travel, but even then, it's for purchasing adventurous travel for people who can't find it on their own.
And I still can't find a reasonably good offline maps app for Android, for when access to the Internet isn't so easy.