Discover Anywhere Mobile » Features

More Event Calendar Updates

admin — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 10:37:23 +0000

Day Exclusions

DAM software has long accept a “day exclusion” date field, which allows events to be declared as only happening on a certain day of the week. For example, you may have a “Celebrate Mobile Apps” event (why not!) that runs from Jan 1 through Dec 31, 2011 but only happens on Wednesday or Fridays.

In previous versions of our software, we’d display that the event only happens on Wednesdays and Fridays, but we wouldn’t prevent the event from showing up as today.

We’ve now fixed that and future versions of all apps (and all current .mobi and BlackBerry apps have it) will properly respect the day exclusion rule: if it’s Thursday, that event will list as starting Friday (tomorrow) and never as today.

.Mobi Date

The Mobile (and BlackBerry) events calendar now break up the events calendar by day with headers. For example: San Luis Obispo County’s Farmer Market Calendar (also showing date exclusions).

Events Calendar Updates

admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 15:55:06 +0000

Here’s the latest on our Events Calendar feature. In particular, check our our new date selector feature for our iPhone apps. If you’re already deployed with us and would like to upgrade, send us a note.

Platforms

iPhone

Our iPhone events feature supports:

events order by event date
only active and future events shown
categorization of events
showing all events, as a category
date selection

Event Ordering

Events are always by date first, listing items that happen today first, then tomorrow and so forth. Generally there will be a lot of dates

Event Expiration

Events that are past their “Event End” are removed from the database and not displayed.

Event Categories / Themes

Events may be categorized, in which case the categories are displayed first allowing to select which type of Event they want to look at.

All Events

When Event categories are used, we display first an “All Events” category, so the visitor can see everything happening today.

Date Selector

We now provide a “Date Selector”, allowing visitors to select a particular date for which they want to see events.

Pressing the Calendar button (in the upper right hand corner) will bring up the date selector. Selecting a date will show only that particular date and then clicking the button will hide the date selector. Finally, pressing the button one last time will bring restore the calendar to its normal appearance.

Android

The Android events calendar will support event categories in 3Q11 and a date selector in 4Q11.

BlackBerry / .mobi

The BlackBerry / .mobi events calendar supports event categories today. There are no plans to support a date selector at this time, though this may change depending on customer feedback.

Technology

Event Feeds

Discover Anywhere Mobile can easily import your events into our database from:

Google Calendar
Any iCAL type calendar
Any RSS or Atom feed with Calendar extensions
An XLSX spreadsheet
Helios
Phillyfunguide.com (for you south-eastern PA folks)
A custom made feed from your Content Management System

Event Fields

We currently support the following fields for events data:

Event Start
Event End
Event Days – the days of the week this event are happening
Event Time – the time this event is happening

Event Start and Event End are required – if an event is just ongoing generally we just set the event end to be far in the future.

Event Days allow events to be limited to certain days of the week. Right now this data is merely displayed to the user but in 3Q11 we’ll ensure that this is properly accounted for, especially when displaying events that are “today”. If an event has further exclusion rules, such as “except holidays”, this will be displayed to the visitor as text.

Event Time is a human-readable value, displayed to visitors as text. Future applications requiring during-the-day scheduling (such as for conferences) will get further extensions.

New Feature: Group Tabs

David Janes — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:19:22 +0000

One feature we’ve been asked for more and more recently is a way to take “top level” tabs and place them all a subtab. For example, take all the social media tabs (Share My Trip, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook & Foursquare) and put them all in a single “Social Media” tab. The reason for this is to reduce clutter on the home page of an application.

Well, it’s done. This:

Becomes this:

This feature is available only on the iPhone right now, but we’ll be moving it to the .mobi, BlackBerry and Android versions soon.

New Feature: Update via WiFi-only

David Janes — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:17:17 +0000

We’re added a new Setting to our iPhone application – Update via WiFi-only.

When this setting is turned “on”, the application will only download data updates when the user is connected to a WiFi network. This isn’t so important for domestic visitors, but international visitors will appreciate being able to keep their roaming charges down. By default, the app ships with this option off but we can selectively turn this on for any destination.

This feature is only available on the iPhone version, but we’ll be moving it to the Android and iPad applications soon.

YouTube Channels

David Janes — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:32:06 +0000

Our iPhone and Android application can now import and display your destination’s YouTube channel. Clicking on the entries in the lists below will start the videos playing. If you’d like to add your channel to your applications, contact us through the usual channels.

Android and Twitter

David Janes — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:22:00 +0000

Listing status reports from your destination’s Twitter accounts and Twitter Lists is now a “first class” operation on our Android version, bringing it up to speed with our iPhone and .mobi versions. All existing Android apps will be updated shortly with this improved feature.

Your Mobile App needs to run well on an iPod Touch

David Janes — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:05:38 +0000

The iPod Touch is an iPhone without a cell phone, cell network internet connectivity or a camera. It can, however, connect to the Internet through WiFi. In the travel means (sometimes) in a hotel, (sometimes) in a Starbuck’s and (almost always) pay-per-use. Tourists with an iPod Touch can sometimes reach the Internet but usually they cannot.

It is very important for DMOs and CVBs to realize the implications of this.

Many iPhone app companies are just traditional web developers offering what are called “wrapped apps”. A wrapped app looks – more or less – like an iPhone app, except it’s really just a shell of an application connecting to a web server over the Internet. This means that if your visitor is not connected to the Internet, they can’t use your app! And when they can connect to the Internet, there’s still very little immediacy – things take seconds to happen, rather than the instant touch-response cycle people expect from great apps.

Not only does this affect all iPod Touch users, it is also detrimental to any iPhone-using foreign visitor who will be paying very high data rates to connect to the web over the cell network. If they can’t use your app, or don’t want to use your app because it’s costing them a lot of money, they’re not going to get that great experience they’re looking for in your destination from your app.

How would using a wrapped app affect your DMO? The numbers follow…

From The Apple Blog, iPod touch Now Outselling iPhone:

At the iPad event, Steve Jobs announced 75 million iPhone OS devices had been sold to date, though whether that date was January 27 or January 1 is not known. It won’t matter either way, but let’s assume the latter. Through 2009, Apple sold 42.517 million iPhones. Subtract that number from 75 million iPhone OS devices and we get 32.483 million iPod touches.

If you’re still awake, here’s the bottom line: the rate of sales growth of the iPod touch is very likely greater than the table shows, as in double that of the iPhone. True, the period includes the holiday quarter, the best quarter for iPods, but it just doesn’t matter. The iPod touch, the stealth device for iPhone OS, will be the best-selling model for the platform in 2010, if it isn’t already, and it is.

To reiterate: there are about 32 million iPod Touches out there and a wrapped app won’t reach them when they need it most: in your destination.

From AdMob January 2010 Mobile Metrics Report:

iPod Touch users download an average of 12 apps a month, 37% more apps than iPhone and Android users.

The bottom line from the AdMob report? iPod Touch users love to use apps – but you have to make sure that they can use yours! A wrapped app – an app that depends on being connected to the Internet – does not allow them to do this.

Discover Anywhere Mobile produces native iPhone apps. All the essential data your visitors need is stored right in their iPhone / iPod Touch. This means that whether or not they’re connected to the Internet, they’re going to be able to find the things they’re looking for – and that’s why your DMO/CVB created the app in the first place, right?

All images taken from original blog posts.

Weather and Forecasts

David Janes — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:57:29 +0000

Discover Anywhere Mobile’s now includes a “weather” option, to show weather in your destination. Weather is shown just like another theme, with the current weather being shown in the icon in the list view and the “About” details showing the full current conditions and a 5 day forecast. Weather is courtesy of Google’s Weather API.