Ask HN: Rate my new iPhone app Locurious | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate my new iPhone app Locurious

6 pointsjarin5 comments

My new app Locurious just got approved on the App store. It's a location-based iPhone app for finding deals and events in San Diego (more cities coming later). It's a little rough around the edges right now, but I'd love to get some feedback or ideas from you guys about the app and/or the website! http://locurious.com

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Looks very nice and I think it's an idea that will take over the market pretty soon. The old ways of finding out these deals were through websites and that meant you had to google for that information, get ads and pop-ups when now it can be aggregated on your mobile phone.

One recommendation is that you could also include a community vote, so that people that are using this application can also give their impressions on the different restaurants and vote up or down different places.

I have a couple of technical questions as well, to which hopefully you will give me an answer: What is the architecture of your application? What architecture do you use for the client-server communication in the application? Do you use any cloud services? What is your method of transferring information from client to server (JSON, SOAP)?

Thanks and good luck with it!

Thanks, the backend is Rails 3 with a JSON-based API. The backend is hosted on Heroku and images are served from Amazon S3, with logs saved to MongoHQ. The app itself is written with Appcelerator Titanium, but we're switching the iPhone version over to native Cocoa/Three20 because Titanium for iOS 4 is pretty unstable right now.

The web site looks nice, though I would have liked a few more screenshots.

The app looks like it would be useful, though it all depends on how many businesses you get to partner with. (Since it's only for San Diego, I haven't actually downloaded it. If it comes to my city I'll give it a try.)

I assume you have lots of competition in this space (location-based deals and events). Do you know who the big players are and what your "niche" or main advantage over them is?

We have some local competition from an app called Tip City, but we think we can do better. There are also a good number of competitors based in other cities, and it's pretty much a race to see who can expand to other cities faster. We're focusing on direct relationships with the businesses and really taking their feedback into account when developing features. Plus we have some "special sauce" in the works that none of our competitors have.

clickable: http://locurious.com

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