Fog of World
fogofworld.com
fogofworld.com
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.
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.
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?
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2012/06/go-offline-with-g...
It's a life saver if you're traveling through middles of nowhere.
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.
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.
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.
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!
You want this:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ulmon.andr...
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.
That means this is not a product I would be able to get most of my social group to use.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
I agree with some of the other comments that using it in some of the places I've travelled would be unrealistic due to battery life.
Would be great if I could import a csv of my Flight Diary data [1]
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).
Possible in the future?
We're also planning some new importing sources, including geo-tagged photos.
Also 1% of the world seems impossible considering the line of sight when walking around. Even 1% of most countries is impossible.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
There you go :)
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.
Anyway, get off my lawn, yada yada...
So don't use it?
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.
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.
See the Snopes article on the subject: http://www.snopes.com/business/alliance/menthol.asp
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)
Here's a screenshot from my vacation a few days ago.
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 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.
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 ! :)
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).
If you want a good excuse to just gtfo, come to Switzerland exchange business cards with me.
This is based on a real military concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war
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.
I travel internationally quite a bit, actually feeling a bit bummed this didn't exist a couple of years ago :(
Hopefully doesn't eat so much battery that my phone dies before the day is over.
Some feedback on the site itself: I'm having trouble reading the text due to the low contrast. (Maybe my monitor isn't setup properly?)
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.
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".
I know exactly what I'm getting for $5 worth of McDonalds. $5 for an app feels more risky because I have no idea if there will be any value.
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.
What I'm saying is the price is too expensive for me to get a large sample of my social group to try it out.
This will hinder the app's growth.
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.
>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.
Otherwise, looks batteful.
might be more appropriate for what you're looking for
If this can tap into that same urge, I think it could do pretty well.
Unfortunately my GPX export from Foursquare doesn't seem to show up in the application.
I used this utility for what it's worth: http://etgps.net/gps/4sq/
I have to say the prose copy is a bit clunky though.