Zhephree

Hey, everyone! Just wanted to give you guys a quick heads-up about my availability soon.

Since I have four apps out in the Catalog, I figured I should let my users know that I will most likely not be available to respond to tweets or e-mails over the next week and a half since I’m getting married next weekend.

I will absolutely respond to support requests via Twitter or email once I return from my break.

Here’s where you can get support:

foursquare: if there is a problem with the foursquare service (i.e., not connecting, wrong points, improper mayorship, etc) you can contact foursquare’s support (as you should always be doing in these cases) on Twitter at @4sqSupport or on their support site: http://support.foursquare.com/home. If you have problems with the foursquare app, you can use the in-app contact form to send me a message and I’ll get to it as soon as I start handling e-mail again.

growlr: As with foursquare, if you have problems with the Untappd service, you can contact Untappd via twitter: @untappd or their support site: http://help.untappd.com/ And if you have a problem with the app, shoot me a tweet at @zhephree and I’ll respond sometime after the 16th.

neato!: Shoot me a tweet at @zhephree or @neato_webos and I’ll respond sometime after the 16th.

incredible!: Shoot me a tweet @zhephree or @incrediblewebos and I’ll respond sometime after the 16th.

Just wanted everyone to know so you won’t freak out if I don’t respond in my usual timely manner.

Enjoy a Zhephree-less week!

A handful of users have been reporting that the webOS foursquare app is only awarding them 1 point for every check-in, whether they’re the mayor or not.

I’ve talked to foursquare and this is not a bug, but rather a change in how points are calculated for off-the-grid check-ins.

Normally, if you are the mayor of a venue, you earn 3 points instead of the usual 1 point. However, now if you check-in to that same venue, but are off-the-grid (that is, the “Show Your Friends” checkbox is unchecked), you will only receive 1 point.

Foursquare told me that the reason for this is to encourage users to be more social since, after all, that’s the point of social networks.

This does not mean you HAVE to share to Facebook and Twitter. This just means you will only get 1 point for your check-in if you hide it from your foursquare friends.

So, if you’d like to receive full points, you will have to check the Share with Friends box when checking in.

Foursquare told me they’re in the process of updating their Support/FAQ page with this change.

After HP effectively killed webOS devices and made webOS’s future uncertain, they launched a “firesale” this weekend, pushing TouchPads out the door at $99. They’re sold out almost everywhere. This has lead to thousands of new webOS users itching to download apps. I figured it’d be cool to see what happened with my apps over the weekend.

foursquare
This is by far my most popular app and it continues to be so. In its heyday, about a year or so ago, it would average about 400 downloads per day. In the last 8-12 months, that number has steadily decreased to about 250 per day. Sunday saw 511 downloads, almost double my daily average. TouchPad users went from a handful, around a couple hundred, to over 1700 users checking-in on a TouchPad (including Friday, Saturday, and Sunday downloads). There are now 70% more TouchPad users than Veer users.

neato!
neato! has always had low, but very steady download numbers. Enough cover my monthly cellphone bill, with some spending cash after that. Sunday had a 70% uptick in sales from Saturday, which had a 10% increase from Friday, which also had a 10% increase from Thursday. neato! is a very niche app and it’s hard to explain it in text, so it doesn’t get the downloads it should. It’s also a phone-sized Mojo app, so it doesn’t get top billing like TouchPad-specific apps, making downloads less common on a TouchPad (it works perfectly though). There are now 4 times as many TouchPad users as Veer users, and by the end of the week, I suspect TouchPad users will overtake Pixi users, to put the TouchPad in the number two slot for neato!.

growlr
I don’t track individual downloads for growlr, but from total downloads, it looks like about an 8% increase in users, which is good for such a niche app.

This is all very encouraging to me, and has given me new energy to work on incredible! and get it out the door for the new users. The response from my beta testers has been overwhelmingly positive (with bug reports as well, naturally), so it feels good.

I encourage other webOS devs (even those that gave up) to look at their stats if they can and see how their apps are doing. It might be encouraging!

marsbot:

An evolution of foursquare design from January 2009 - August 2011

One of the great things about working on one product is the ability to iterate; the bad thing is you never feel like you’re done. 

When foursquare started there was no real visual design on the app. Naveen was coding it up alone and he used all native Apple UI elements. I was helping out on the side and slowly we added custom elements and branding and for SXSW 2010 we did our first visual pass at the design. At that point I was doing everything, and it showed. One person can only do so much. Now we have a talented group of UI and UX designers and these days I mostly work on the iOS app.

We just put out a new build complete with a new blue navigation bar, photos inline, single tap cells and a newly designed check-in detail screen. I’m really proud of this current iteration of the app and can’t wait to see it continue to evolve. 

view larger

Really cool to see. Wish I had all the screenshots of the webOS app. I have a few, but the progression isn’t nearly as elegant.

Guys. Guys. GUYS! Have you seen foursquare’s new lists feature? It’s bad ass! In about 15 minutes I made like 10 lists of stuff in New Orleans. It’s super rad.

Top Pizza Places in New Orleans

The Greatest Po Boys (I’m letting my friends help build this one)

Burgers in NOLA

Great Late Night Eats (we have 24hr bars, so you’re bound to get hungry at weird hours!)

New Orleans Bars That Don’t Suck (We’re a tourist town, so we’ve got some lame bars here. These aren’t them)

Best Restaurants in New Orleans My List is way different than most people’s, I’m sure.

Anyway, see how cool these are? The next time a friend’s coming in to visit you make a list of things to do! Or send a list to friends when they go to your favorite city. Or get your friends to help make the best list of your city’s specialty food!

I’m sure lists are planned to be in the mobile apps and once available, I’ll do what I can to get it happening in the webOS app.

Ah yes, ladies and gents — the webOS 3.0.2 update that went out this morning for the TouchPad fixed a critical bug in the emulation of legacy (Mojo) apps and the way WebViews are handled. This prevented you from signing in with your foursquare account, which made the app useless. I prohibited the app from being available for TouchPads.

Well, the update fixes the system bug and I made a few tweaks and the app runs just fine on a TouchPad! I’ve submitted the update to HP tonight, so it should be available soon.

Keen eyes will also note that the foursquare update (v2.8) fixes the 0 Mayorships bug introduced in the last update (v2.7.7). You can now see not only your own, but your friends’ and non-friends’ mayorships in the app.

I also forgot to turn off debug mode in the app when I shipped the last version, which means a TON of data was being written to your device’s logs. In fact, this was happening on every keypress when shouting, which created some super lag when typing shouts. SInce I’ve turned this off in this version (simple slip of the mind last time), you should notice some speed boosts.

So, yeah, small update, but there you go!

Progress on incredible! keeps on moving! I’ve cleaned up foursquare items and added Flickr support. No photo uploads yet, but that’s coming up. Here are some shots:

Here’s a regular ol’ foursquare check-in. Displays the venue’s address and categories. You also have the ability to not only comment on a check-in, but add that venue to your to do list for those times a friend goes somewhere you’ve been meaning to try.

The map image below is static, but tapping it opens a fullscreen interactive Bing map. You can also see comments below that.

Here’s a foursquare check-in where they added a photo when they checked-in. In the stream, the map is replaced with the photo, but in the details pane, you egt a thumbnail of the photo(s) and the map. Tapping them behave as they do elsewhere.

The new service added today was Flickr. You can view all of your contacts recent photo uploads, as well as view any comments on the photo. You can add your own comments, or mark the photo as a favorite. Tapping the photo enlarges it, just like everywhere else.

You’ll also notice that the app displays the service icons for each stream item. Once duplicate detection is complete, each item that has duplicates will have multiple service icons. So, for the Flickr photo above, if it was sent to Twitter or also uploaded to Facebook, it would do its best to detect it as a duplicate, you’d only see the photo once in your stream, but you’d see two different service icons under the user’s avatar instead of just the Flickr one.

That’s what’s new for now. Most of all the basic features of these four services (Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, and Flickr) has been added in. I’d say about 95%. Then there’s the task of adding incredible!-specific features. Rules and Groups have been added, but duplicate detection and some filters and rule styles still need work, plus a few other fun features I haven’t mentioned before.

Anyway, stay tuned! This is the closest I’ve ever felt to getting this in people’s hands.

Foursquare announced a cool new feature! Notifications! Obviously, they aren’t push, but it’d be cool to have these as dashboard notifications. There’s no documentation on the feature yet, but it does appear in the API at the users/self/ endpoint.

If you want to tackle this, lemme know!

Thanks to everyone that has ever downloaded the app! While 100,000 pales in comparison to foursquare’s in-house apps, it means a lot that this unfortunately small mobile OS has had such an interest in a very young location-based network. Foursquare just recently hit 10 million users which puts webOS right around the 1% mark, which we’ve been hovering around since early 2010. I’d LOVE to see this higher, but, considering this app has been a side project I’ve been building for free, I’m cool with it!

With the TouchPad’s launch this week, I’m working to make sure the app runs well enough on it. While it may not run at launch, rest assured, it will eventually!

Want to help make foursquare better, add features, and/or increase device-compatibility? Join me and @rretsiem and @millertech in the great world of open source development! Go here and may the fork be with you!

Thanks again for downloading the app and for all your help and feedback, everyone!

For those working on or looking to work on foursquare for webOS, another task!

Foursquare allows apps to set the global settings for a user. For instance, on the website, you can enable sending mayorships to twitter or Facebook. The API allows apps to provide a preference for users to do this.

It’d be cool if someone would add these preferences into the Preferences of the app with on/off switches.

Documentation is here: https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/settings/set.html

Leave out “receiveCommentPings” since the app doesn’t support those. (Another task?!)

Basically, I envision there being a “Facebook Settings” and a “Twitter Settings” section in the Preferences.

Facebook Settings
- By default, send check-ins to Facebook
- Share the badges I earn to Facebook
- Share the mayorships I earn to Facebook

Twitter Settings
- By default, send check-ins to Twitter
- Share the badges I earn to Twitter
- Share the mayorships I earn to Twitter

The API will return a JSON object with a message to display to the user. an Alert Popup should display this message.

Obviously, these settings will have to be retrieved when the app is launching, which it already does in the background when the user is logged in. So, you should tap into this response that already happens and set the preferences accordingly. https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/settings/all.html

Since these settings affect server-side functions, the app doesn’t need any other changes.

Let me know if you want in on building this. Source code is here: https://github.com/foursquare/foursquare-palmpre