Gowallalotbigger!

No, I don’t yet have an iPad, but this release might be one of the things that pushes me over the edge. I’ve been drooling over the Tech Crunch screenshots and @keeg’s Flickr set for weeks now, but I didn’t know it had hit the iTunes store until I saw Chris Harrison tweet: “Gowalla for iPad. I haz it.” You’ll have to rely on the following hands-on reviews until I get an iPad of my own, but it’s sure to be full of win. It’s a free app for the iPad, so grab it now!

• “Wow. Gowalla for iPad is even prettier than the Flickr tease shots posted by @keeg. I am seriously impressed.” – @cdharrison
• “umm, @gowalla for the iPad is freaking awesome! ’nuff said…” – @unmatchedstyle
• “@gowalla app for iPad is gorgeous. I love this simplicity.” – @fredricw
• “Checking out the new @gowalla iPad app.. Love it. Great UI and design.” – @michaeltejada
• “@gowalla for iPad is fantastic, especially with 3G! Serious mobile chocolate addiction…” – @hoisumguo

A Gimpse into Wonderland

Want to know where to find a Gowalla Microbrew? Or any other virtual Gowalla item for that matter? Then you should also be excited about Ben Dodson’s Gowalla Tools iPhone app that is set to be revealed on May 12th. I use the term “revealed” because even as one of the few beta testers, I’ve only seen one small component of app’s functionality, that component is code named “The Red Queen”.

Some of you may remember when clicking on a missing items in the Gowalla Tools web application provided a list of places where you could find that item. Knowing where to look made it much easier to hunt items down. Unfortunately, Gowalla blocked a part of their undocumented API that made that feature tick. Since then, Ben has come up with an ingenious way to provide the same service. He’s crawling every single bonus item popup that the app produces to provide realtime odds of finding item x at spot y. Since Gowalla is constantly tweaking the probability of finding each item, this is a much more accurate way of tacking down bonus items. My actual reply to Ben after testing out The Red Queen yesterday was, “This takes the web app version of your item finder, straps it on solid-fuel rocket boosters and fires it into space blasting AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ out the driver-side window…” That description may seem a bit over-the-top, but it will definitely be a useful tool for Gowalla Players and it’s going to be a FREE download on the app store. To stay up-to-date with what’s going on with Gowalla Tools, follow @GowallaTools, the Gowalla Tools Tumblr and curiously enough, a white guinea pig.

Gowalla Sniffer

I was both intrigued and suspicious of the $1.99 price tag on this app. Remember that we’re talking about helper apps for a FREE service that has given free access to an API. While I happily paid a dollar more than this for my preferred Twitter client, I did so because the reviews confirmed that it was worth the money. Unfortunately, I don’t have much good to say about Gowalla Sniffer.

The home screen of this app has 4 buttons:

1. sniffer – As the title feature, I’m guessing this is supposed to be “the big one”. For me, it just shows a loading spinner for a few minutes and then pops up a time out error…every time.
2. trackr – Allows you to bookmark something from your pack so you can see it’s activity after you drop it. Coming to Gowalla from Geocaching, I like the idea because it reminds me of travel bugs. I really don’t care to do this while I’m on the hunt for missing items though. If I really wanted to track an item, I can do so by bookmarking the item url in my browser (which I could even do via Mobile Safari) and I’m not limited to bookmarking items I currently have in my pack.
3. monitor – You get two options in the monitor page: locations or friends. Locations seems to show a list of the places you’ve checked into most in different areas. When I hit this screen I get my neighborhood and my previous workplace. Supposedly it watches the available radius of those 2 locations for items you need, but of course it didn’t find anything for me. Clicking on friends tells you that it will automatically monitor your friends to alert you of missing items. All I get on this page is a list of my friends. Clicking on each shows the items in their pack after a few seconds of watching a loading spinner. I assume that if one of them had something I needed, it would show up at the top? That would be nice. Both of the monitor features seem half-baked.
4. vault – If you use Gowalla, I’m sure you know what this does. It’s nice to be able to see your collection on the go, but now that Gowalla tells you if you already have something in your collection, this feature isn’t really necessary.

Overall, most of the time I spent messing with the Gowalla Sniffer app was wasted on watching a loading animation. It seems to me like the app is nothing more than a mobile safari instance loading everything from the web as you click each button. I even had to re-authenticate a couple times. I had planned to let a few users who had a lot more items to find try this app out from my phone, but when I upgraded to OS4 Beta, this app suddenly stopped working altogether. I guess I would have been better off investing that $1.99 in a cup of coffee.

Gowalla Swag

After the disappointing experience that was Gowalla Sniffer, I was actually pretty leery about spending 99¢ on another Gowalla helper app – especially with an icon featuring the dreaded “Marker Felt” typeface. The description for Gowalla Swag is pretty short, and so is the feature set. I’m happy to report though that for the few things it does, it does very well.

When you open the app for the first time, you’re presented with a login screen. Once entered your Gowalla credentials, you get a list of the closest spots with items up for trade. Clicking on a spot shows you a list of the available items there. At the bottom of the screen are Next and Prev buttons that allow you to quickly browse the stash at each location. That sounds pretty basic, but it does this lightning fast. To give you an idea what I mean, I closed the app and timed myself. It took exactly 35 seconds for the app to start up and for me to browse through all the items available at the closest 22 spots to my current location. See something you need at a spot? Just click on the spot name and you’re automatically logged into the Gowalla web app where you can quickly check in and snag your prize. It’s not a complex tool, but definitely one that I’ll be using.

Gowalla Tools?

Long before the API was ever released, mad scientist and iPhone developer, Ben Dodson started creating his series of web-based tools to help Gowalla users find items. I credit his map tool specifically for helping me find many of the items I have in my collection.

Ben has been working on a native iPhone version of his suite of Gowalla tools for several months now and as one of the beta testers for this upcoming app, I can’t wait to get my hands on it. Functionality-wise, it’s sure to blow any other Gowalla helper apps out of the water. I’ll be sure to post details here as soon as I’m allowed. In the mean time, I’ll be reviewing any and all Gowalla apps that aren’t ridiculously priced and don’t *cough* have 5-star reviews from their developers posing as paying customers…because that’s just pathetic.

Quick update from @GowallaTools:

“And just to reiterate, the GowallaTools iPhone app will be free and awesome – full details coming very soon ;)” ~ 04/15/2010

I knew it was going to be awesome, but wasn’t sure about the “free” part. Thanks Ben!

The Gowalla Map really is an indispensable tool for item collectors, but if you take the time to zoom out a bit, it also provides some interesting real-time insight into regional and global usage of the game as well. Because the maximum number of spots you can view at one time is limited to 100, you have to zoom in pretty close in some areas to see all of the available spots. Notice at this zoom level in downtown Columbia, SC there are 93 spots shown:

If you zoom any further out, you lose some of the older spots. With that 100 most-recent spot filter in place though, you start to see trends in where the most active spot creation is taking place. Here’s what I get if I look at the greater Columbia area and redraw the map:

Taking this a couple steps further, if you zoom out far enough to see a few states, the larger cities start to stand out on the map. In this next screenshot you can clearly see that Columbia, Charleston & Augusta have far less recently created spots than a big metropolitan city like Atlanta, GA:

As you zoom further and further out, those 100 spots scatter all over the map. When you consider that hundreds of new Gowalla spots are created everyday across the globe, seeing the most-recent 100 spots in the United States may not seem relevant, but many of the same cities have pins every time I redraw the map at this level:

The usefulness of this information goes far beyond a popular LBG. Where there are active Gowalla hot-spots, there are active iPhone users. These pin clusters may only represent a small segment of iPhone users, but if you’re developing anything for the iPhone, it’s certainly something you should keep an eye on.

Flip your monitor to reveal the answer:
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While I thought I’d never have to answer this question, Ames accidentally dropped her iPhone last week and deciding what to do about it was tougher than you might think. Once we got past the tragedy of the situation and faced reality though, we found that replacing a cracked iPhone screen yourself is actually quite inexpensive and straightforward.

Assuming you have a hairdryer, some paperclips and a pair of tweezers at home, and that the LCD in your 3G iPhone is still working, this 3G Replacement Front Glass and Digitizer kit from Amazon (currently $11.19 + $4.99 shipping) should be all you need to buy. With only those tools and parts, we were able to repair the iphone pictured above by following this helpful YouTube video:

While it doesn’t say so in the product description, the replacement screen & digitzer actually came with the necessary screwdriver and suction cup mentioned in the video, as well as the adhesive strips. The whole repair took about an hour and a half, roughly the length of the second half of South Carolina’s unwatchably poor performance in the PapaJohns.com bowl. The video does a great job of breaking down the process but we did run into a couple hiccups.

The first problem came when disconnecting the LCD assembly from the phone. There are 3 wires to disconnect, labeled 1, 2 & 3. The first 2 wires pop straight up, but the description for releasing the 3rd wire wasn’t very clear. There’s a little off-white tab that must be flipped up (see image to the left) so that the 3rd ribbon wire can slide out from the other side. The other problem we ran into, and the step that took the bulk of the time, was separating the glass and digitizer from the frame. It took a lot of heating with a hair dryer before the glass finally started letting go from the plastic frame. The person in the video used a heat gun, which probably would have worked better, but the glass is glued all the way around frame. Despite how cracked the screen looked, we actually managed to peel our glass off in one piece, but it took a lot of time and patience. It probably didn’t hurt that Amy had a screen protector on her phone that held together all the shattered glass.

Other than those two slow-downs, the process was as simple as advertised. Once the new glass/digitizer was affixed to the frame using the included adhesive strips, reassembling the phone was as simple as following the previous instructions in reverse. After reconnecting all the wires and putting everything back together the phone seemed to work perfectly…and then the screen stopped recognizing touch. Assuming it was just a loose wire, we removed the screen/digitzer/LCD assembly and reconnected the wires and everything seems to be back to new again. All in all, I’m impressed that the damage pictured above was fixable with about $15 and a little DIY confidence. I didn’t realize just how often people break the glass in these phones and I’m personally appalled that Apple charges between $199-$249 to do the exact same repair. It should also be noted that doing this repair yourself voids your warranty with Apple.

Note that I’m talking about the 3G iphone and not the first-gen or 3GS. From what I’ve read, the replacement process is similar, but the glass/digitizer kit is more expensive for the 3GS and replacing the screen on the first-gen is supposedly a little harder because there’s more glue.