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As we reflect upon the year’s events , let’s talk once again about Geolocation, not as a new phenomenon but as a summary of the evolution of this service in 2010.

Among other reasons already mentioned in a previous blog post, the fact that more and more mobile devices have GPS is one of the major causes of the course taken by geolocation service in the last months of 2010.

Increased use of this service is one of the most remarkable effects: According to an article published by Mashable  last week, Foursquare, the most popular geolocation platform, has 5 million users, increasing its user base by a factor of 10 in just nine months.

The act of sharing the location has changed, it also added tastes of people, their opinions about visited places, shopping recommendations, vacation tips or tips for a nice dinner at a new and romantic restaurant.

Users use geolocation as a source of information, a service which not only encompasses “where” but also “how”, “when” and “who”.

Beyond sharing people locations, these services have also been designed to help businesses attract more customers to their stores since most of them help employers encourage engagement and promote virtual social interaction around a physical location. Slowly, companies, especially restaurants, are joining geolocation sites to implement different marketing actions, so far, only experiments waiting for the feedback from the public.

A good example is the campaign that Telepizza made in Foursquare, an action fully focused on marketing objectives.

Telepizza offered discounts on pizzas to people who did check-in at local or nearby restaurants.

What did Telepizza achieve?

1. Geo-segmentation: users who checked-in had a very high probability of being from the same neighborhood of Telepizza

2. Behavioral Segmentation: Telepizza marketing reached people who use to commonly  go out to dinner

3. Clients loyalty: Telepizza rewards every time you eat there

4. Channels desaturation: a person who buys in the store is a person who does not use the phone or the website of that store.

5. Even… stealing customers! If when I go into a store and do my check-in, I get a better deal for a pizza at another location nearby, of course I will think of leaving this restaurant and make my way to Telepizza.

So far we have appointed two players linked to the evolution of geolocation in 2010: users and businesses. The third character on stage is the developer: On the one hand, web sites are quick to offer and incorporate geolocation services into their interfaces. On the other hand, applications which include geolocation are multiplying with the same speed.

Foursquare knows that. Therefore, it has an API that allows developers to build their ideas on the foursquare platform. Developers use the API to build new check-in functionality, cool games, and interesting data visualizations.

SimpleGeo deserves special mention here.

SimpleGeo defines itself as a service which makes it easy for developers to create location-aware applications. SimpleGeo provides relevant contextual information such as geographic boundaries, weather, and demographics for a specific location. It offers a free database of business listings and points of interest (POIs) that enables real-time community collaboration. It provides api clients in Objective-C, Android, Java, Python.

According to TechCrunch , ” SimpleGeo wants to help make business data freely available for anyone to use, which would be a gigantic shift in how location … apps could be built more cheaply.

Thus, throughout this year, geolocation has become increasingly popular among ordinary users, being an attractive market niche for companies and developers.

As mobile technology continues to impose the idea of being “always connected”, geolocation will gain strength and prominence as a new form of social interaction.

In a previous blog post we tell you about another interesting and new use of geolocation, connected to art, which is still developing and has remained outside the commercial world.

In recent times, one of the hot topics discussed on the blogosphere is the advantages and disadvantages of developing websites for smartphones instead of applications. During the Tangelo Startup House, Tangelo developed a  web application adapted to be displayed in Retina Display, HTML5 and CSS3. Twitday was met with widespread approval from the beginning. So much so that before its publication, our new website began to have its first visitors.

With this post we want to share with you some tips that helped us in developing our first WebApp for iPhone.

So do you want to develop your first web application?

First of all keep in mind iPhone’s Safari Browser support HTML5 and CSS3. For this reason, you need to know the latest technology available and the iPhone touch API, as well.

Using frameworks will help you if you are doing it for the first time. However, we really prefer to do all the actions manually because then it is much easier to find the code and make changes, if necessary.

These links are very useful to learn about the innovations in the mobile browser: Safari Dev Center, Surfin- Safari, HTML5 presentation. With this in mind you can start building your website. You can do everything manually or by using a frameworks.

The most popular frameworks are:

  • JQTouch: It is quite easy to start developing webapps, but if we put a lot of content on our website it        starts getting cluttered.
  • Sencha Touch: It is a powerful tool based on the ExtJS library. This tool is highly recommended
  • JQuery Mobile: (NEW) This library is very similar to JQTouch.

Tools and Tips to help you to develop a webbapp for iPhone

  • IPhone Simulator: To work with the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) you will need to register you as an iPhone developer and install the iPhone SDK. Once you have installed it, you will find the iPhone simulator in it.
  • Console: ( to debug our pages) Once enable you can use this feature with a single javascript call: i.e. console.log(‘message’)
  • Viewport: By default, Safari on the iPhone will render your page as if it were a desktop browser on a big screen, with 980 pixels width available for the web content. Then it will scale down the content so that it fits the small screen. As a result, the user sees your page with miniscule, illegible letters and must zoom in to see the interesting parts. You must declare the viewport meta element. It sets the width to the maximum device width. You will might follow:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1, user-scalable=no” />

  • Home Screen Icon: When a user adds your page to the Home screen, the iPhone uses a screenshot of your page as an icon. But you can improve it providing your own icon. The icon must be a 57×57 png file.

    • <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”icon.png” />

  • Offline: You might declare the cache manifest to allow users to access to your WebApp without an internet connection. The cache manifest gets the static content you want for offline WebApps . To enable this you might add the manifest attributte to html tag and create a file .manifest with all content wich you want to store.
  • Hide address bar: To hide the address bar you might add this JavaScrip code. Simply scroll the page one pixel down, using window.scrollTo. If your page is too short to be scrollable, you can add an additional meta element to make it scrollable:

    • windows.onload = function() {

    window.scrollTo(0, 1) }

  • Special links: If your Web has a phone number you can select it by touch and call the number without typing it out. Phone numbers automatically become links provided, of course, that they have a phone number format. But if you want to create the phone links manually, you can use the phone’s prefix (URI scheme), for example:

    • <a href=”tel:800555123″>Call 800-555-123</a>

    If an SMS text is more your style, use the sms: scheme to launch the iPhone’s text message application.

    <a href=”sms:800555123″>Send SMS</a>

    Or mail to

    <a href=”mailto:example@itangelo.com”>Questions?</a>

    Images (Retina display):

    You can define multiple Style Sheets, allowing each device to use the appropriate one. This way you make good use of the capabilities of each device.

    You just have to carefully define the meta tag for the style sheet to be automatically selected as follows:

    NORMAL

    <link rel=”stylesheet” media=”only screen” href=”styles/normal.css”>

    IPHONE

    <link rel=”stylesheet” media=”only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)” href=”styles/iphone.css”>

    IPAD

    <link rel=”stylesheet” media=”only screen and (min-device-width: 481px) and (max-device-width: 1024px)” href=”styles/ipad.css”>

    IPHONE 4

    <link rel=”stylesheet” media=”only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2)” href=”styles/ipod-4.css”  />

      Conclusion

      The advantage of developing WebApps for iPhone is that we can concentrate all our efforts into one single WebBrowser. We even have frameworks which help us to easily insert on track.

      So, what are you waiting for?

      Making iPhone applications can be more fun than making normal websites. We have many tools, tutorials and people -for example bloggers- to make it easy and help you to get it right.

      by @leilaergo

      iphone jailbreak

      iphone jailbreak

      On July 26, 2010 in the United States, the practice known as jailbreak was finally legalized -within its territory. The process of jailbreaking allows your iPhone to have applications that are not in the Apple Store.

      The legalization of the practice of jailbreak was great news for mobile application developers. Be careful what you read! There is much confusion between the terms unlock and jailbreak. Until that day in July, the only excuse that Apple had to not allow this practice was its illegal status.

      Now, Apple can no longer base its rejection of the jailbreak on the DMCA. For this reason, Apple’s first reaction was to remind users that the company will not recognize the warranty of devices that have been manipulated in some way. That is, according to Apple, jailbreaking your iPhone is not recommended because of issues related to security and the proper functioning of the device, it is not due to illegality.

      However, no one expected that the reaction of Apple would end with this subtle message because nothing changed: the jailbreaks would remain, and Apple would continue cancelling them with subsequent software updates.

      A few days after the launch of the iPhone 4, Apple discovered that his star device had two major flaws, which generated contrary reactions in the company and users as well:

      1. Problems with signal reception: Apple did not focus on the signal reception and got away with it with the controversial advice of Jobs: ”hold your phone right”. Those who were already using the phone with its innovative Retina Display reacted negatively.
      2. A flaw in the iPhone 4 operating system allows you to run the jailbreak via web: This is new because traditionally a jailbreak had to be run on a Mac or PC, with the iPhone or device connected to it during the process. In contrast to the other failure of the device, users jumped for joy as Apple took the necessary measures to fix it as soon as possible.

      The iPhone’s operating system was updated shortly after launch. iOS 4.0.2 version fixes the flaw that allowed to perform the jailbreak of the iPhone via web; perhaps it was an unpleasant surprise for Apple, who does not like the idea of shops besides the App Store. For this very reason, the next update of Safari for iPhone could break indirectly the jailbreaking via web.

      However, the real move of Apple to defend the Apple Store did not take long: only a few days ago, Apple has filed a patent that covers several methods to identify and disable unauthorized use of electronic devices such as iPhone and IPAD. The patent filed by Apple aims primarily at taking measures for the identification of stolen devices and to protect the personal information of users stored on devices.

      The patent also covers methods to identify devices that have been hacked, jailbreaked, unlocked or have had the SIM card removed .

      Thus, under the pretext of protecting user data against possible theft devices, Apple is looking for ways to “kill” jailbreaked devices, since there is no way of knowing whether a device has been stolen or it is jailbroken with the consent of the user.

      Around the jailbreak, a sort of “micro-scale cold war” has begun and everyone has something to say about it. So, use caution when reading because there is a lot of misinformation in the cloud, plus precipitated tips by alleged “experts” who only tend to confuse or encourage actions that often are not recommended.

      Remember that in addition to inform yourself properly, you can ask us your questions because we are a company that specializes in mobile (iPhone, Android and others) technology.

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      What is Twitday?

      Twitday is a fun web app that dynamically displays tweets and location of a group of people. Twitday can be used at events like conferences, concerts or meetups. You can specify usernames, hashtags and location. People can read relevant tweets, follow new people and retweet directly from Twitday. This is an app completely devoted to a particular event.

      Our goal was to make our first website compatible with the last technological standards and with different devices: CSS3, Google Maps API, Twitter API, iPads, iPhones, desktops and especially the Retina Display of the iPhone 4.

      How does Twitday work?

      From now, you have access to Twitday from the Tangelo’s website.

      On Twitday you will find:

      • A map with the locations of each member of the a group – the Tangelo’s team for example-.
      • The tweets timeline, published by each member of the group, so you can be updated on the latest events.
      • If you prefer to follow what is published by a particular person, you will see the whole Twitter activity of that person (tweets, RT and references), and also his profile, with a single click.

      The important fact to remember is that you’ll be able to see all this information from any device, with the best image quality.

      When Twitday will be online available?

      You can start playing with TwitDay right now!

      Let us know if you’d like to use it for your event.