Who?

Hello my name is Graham Royston, I work in the entertaiment industry for a large cinema chain. I love taking photo's/video and creating things. 

Please a look arround, make yourself at home I read all comments posted. 

All the opinions on this site are my own and do not reflect the policy's or culture of my employers 

Thanks for visiting

For more info on me Check out my about.me profile!

Find Stuff

Get Social

Flickr
Topics

Entries in iphone app (2)

Friday
Jan152010

Location Based Gaming

Recently i’ve been very interested in the rise of location based games, made possible by advancing mobile technology, specifically GPS, to make these games the next “Big Thing”.

Here i’ve decided to give you the lowdown on what its all about:

There a number of companies in this space but leading the pack are two, Gowalla and Foursquare! Both are very similar but each have their pro’s and con’s which is not something I will be going into now but check out this article from Mashable.com which will give you a good comparison.

The aim of Foursquare and Gowalla is to ‘Check In’ to locations when you’re out and about, as you do this you receive stamps, and the more you ‘Check In’ you can achieve different objectives and be awarded Pins for Gowalla & Badges with Foursquare. For example - In Foursquare if you visit 3 bars in one night you gain the “bender” bags… wicked!!!

The main difference between the two is: in Gowalla you can pick up and drop items, see their history, where they have been and who has had them. In Foursquare if you visite a location more often than anyone else, you become the “Mayor” of said location. Also Foursquare allows you to create to-do’s for that location that friends can see. (E.g. In a restaurant you could recommend what to eat).

Interestingly, businesses where these apps are popular take advantage and use them for marketing purposes, in San Francisco the “Mayor” of a pizza place (don’t know the name) gets free pizza and 1st round of drinks free every week! thus causing other customers using Foursquare to compete for the “Mayorship” by visiting more. Fantastic idea!

These apps don’t only have gaming appeal, the social networking aspect between friends is just as valuable. In both cases the apps are private which means you authorise who can and can’t see you account making you whereabouts available to trusted people only. Im looking forward to the day when I can look at my Gowalla on a night out and see my friends are in the bar next door giving me the opportunity to go and say hello!!

Personally i’ve been using Gowalla for a couple of months and my verdict is I like it. The UI looks good and the ability to add location and geo tag them using  my Iphones GPS is great!  I do have to admit however that I do like the look of Foursquare, I find the Mayorship concept appealing. So the reason why I’m not using it???? Because Foursquare only supports locations for specific Cities… Until now!

Foursquare was only available in a handful of cities, 17 I Think, but earlier this week Foursquare Everywhere was released. This opened up Foursquare users to the whole world! Here’s the full article from the Foursquare blog to tell you exactly what this means.

So all’s what i’m waiting for now is Apple to past version 1.5 of the iphone app and i’ll be taking over Blackpool by becoming the Mayor one location at a time.

As I said location based gaming is set to be the next “Big Thing” in the next 12-24 months I think we will see this become as popular as twitter, maybe even farmville!

So follow me in my location based gaming quest and just hit me up a friends request from the links bellow

Follow me in Gowalla http://gowalla.com/users/Royston1980

Follow me in Foursquare http://foursquare.com/user/-204906

Peace and Love

G

Wednesday
Nov042009

Iphone app - Squarespace

 
 Finally its here! Well slap my bum and call me melvin, the Iphone app for Squarespace is finally out. Thank you Apple and Squarespace.

I've not had much time to play with it but 1st impressions are good. Features include as you move accross the 5 icons across the bottom of screen after you have logged into your chosen account (yes it does support multiple accounts)....

Post            Manage      Preview     Statistics     Account

     

Post - Here you can add a title, type a post body, manual edit date and input categorys and tags. You can even add a photo (via taking a pic there and then or chosing from a saved pic) before publishing your post or saving as a draft.

Manage - Presents a list of all the posts to your site. Selecting one will give you the option of either delete edit or view the selected post. 

Preview - Does what it says on the 'tin' shows what your site looks like. My only grip I can find so far is here as this need some more basic browser controls especial back as currently it only has a reload button.

Statistics - Say hello to a nice set of analytical graphs for the site. A nice little feature is by swiping across one of the graph you can change the date range. Info covers Page Views (swiping gives you 1 of 3 different types of page views for the previous 7 days), Subscribers, search (swiping give you 1today, 2day 3day and week views), referrers (swiping give you 1today, 2day 3day and week views). If you select a specific days info on a graph you'll be given a precise figure for that day.

Account - Here list the different accounts you have set up. You also have options for add account and get new account.

According to the iphone blog Squarespace are already planing to add comment management in their 1.1 update to the app.

I'm really looking forward putting this app to use now I can make updates on the move thanks to my Iphone and another great service from Squarespace. 

If your using the app please feel free to leave you thoughts on what you think of it and what features you would like to see in the future bellow. 

Don't go Changin'

G