Comments on: I love design. I hate designing.

By: Derek

Derek — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:52:27 +0000

I like the ordering by distance idea, as well as including the direction to the wall and tap to open up a map and drop a pin. A button to show all nearby walls as pins on a map would be nice too.

Do you have any provision for tweaking the location of a wall as people write on it? This way an inaccurate location for a wall created by a first-generation phone user could gradually be corrected by averaging the location with later inaccurate posts and accurate 3G posts.

That last was just a thought triggered because some early bug had me create a wall 5 miles south of where I intended. I had been at the previous location earlier and the phone apparently didn’t try to refresh my location before I created the new wall. Now, the wall for the “Wellington Pub” in MI is floating 5 miles north of where it should be and, of course, no one else has written on it since no one who sees the wall is actually at the Wellington Pub.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:56:01 +0000

“Ugh. Why am I in front of my computer eating Chinese food on a Saturday night?”

I dream of such a life. haha. Keep up the good work, great idea. I’m looking forward to version 3.

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:53:26 +0000

What if you have a button “Directions to Wall” that drops a pin in maps and gives directions from your current location. Isn’t the point of creating a wall to make notes about a specific location. If I can’t find where the wall is whats the point?

By: classic

classic — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:11:44 +0000

To navigate closer to a wall on purpose, you have to know where it is, which means you would need directionality.

Perhaps “28 meters NE” or something.

By: Matt McSherry

Matt McSherry — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:28:20 +0000

Could you not order the walls in the list on the distance you are to them? So while the internal code has a (rough) idea of the value of the distance, it just moves the wall up or down the list as it gets closer / further away.

You can navigate towards the wall if you’re so inclined by making it jump up the list more, and naturally more relevant walls will be more prominent.

That was you get some vague distance information without having to have sliders, colours or any other paraphernalia.

By: classic

classic — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:03:27 +0000

I like the outline idea as well.

I would regulate the post preview to a certain number of characters or lines, of course.

I was also thinking of pictures (as mentioned in another post) - but in that case, for those of us on edge, would make load times a lot slower, so maybe it could be a user option.

By: anoopr

anoopr — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:09:28 +0000

A lot of you suggested colors, but for the reasons Bill mentioned, I’m hesitant to go down that route. I try to ask myself W.W.A.D. The only place I can think of where they use colors to convey information is in iChat they have the red/yellow/green lights, and those are such universal symbols that their meaning is very clear.

I’m tempted to not include the distance at all, because it will be so inaccurate for most users and walls.

The outline view is a pretty good idea. Maybe I can show the most recent message on each wall in the wall view. I could make the cells look similar to the cells in the Inbox of Mail. Wall name across the top, last updated in the upper right, and the latest message on the wall below.

By: Cville Bill

Cville Bill — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:58:29 +0000

Since I live in Charlottesville, I went to the conceptual birthplace of this great app and walked the downtown mall and had the following observations.
1. I’m glad to see wall distances/freshness coming soon. The text format is fine but I thought a progress bar like widget that showed proximity, perhaps using a logarithmic scale so that gave finer resolution as you approached the wall. I’m not a big fan of color changes, if it’s a gradual spectrum shift, it can be too hard to detect the change, and screens with rainbows of colors start to look cartoonish to me.
2. I wish I had the ability to sort walls either by proximity, freshness (most recent post), wall age (create date disregarding messages) and alphabetically. On the downtown mall there’s quite a few walls and if I passed a restaurant or bar and wanted to see if it had a wall, it was awkward scrolling through the list of walls to try to find it. (Is there an order to it currently?)
3. I thought it might be nice to have walls/messages in an outline sort of view. Selecting a wall (first tap) would cause its (top 5?) messages to be displayed right under the wall title amongst the other walls listed. A second tap on the wall would collapse the list. Tapping on a message shown would open the wall in its own panel and provide viewing of all its messages and provide a way to add your own.
4. I’d like to see landscape support at some point, particularly when reading a wall or adding a message.

I’ve been thinking about the radii ‘problem’ and have some thoughts which aren’t quite ready for prime time, but I have a question. When walls are created, are you capturing the accuracy value as well as lat/lon?

By: Jack

Jack — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 08:36:19 +0000

Hi! What the app needs is a better GUI and a way to choose range for your wall. I can see a wall i created on a place 40km from here. That aint right ;). Do you want to make this app the most killer app out there? I have some ideas:

1. users. Not any sign up shit, just choose a name and connect that to the phone id nr.
2. with users you could add a reply function for provate replies.
3. with users you could have a avatar.
4. you should be able to see the walls you created from anywhere (a selection on the main menu)
5. better graphic interface!
6. choose how big area the wall will have. cafe and mall needs different size.
7. report wall. If there is an inapropiate wall you could press report. after 3 reports the wall will be deleted.
8. Use maps some how? the app would be much nicer if it was more then just text as i said before ;)

sorry for my bad english but you understand… this app has potential!

By: dwoody

dwoody — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:16:01 +0000

The more that I read (pretty much all on this blog!) about Graffitio, the more I am drawn to what it offers in terms of urban exploration. Since I just stumbled onto the app AND this blog, I’ve got some catching up to do. But I love the idea of knowing how far away a wall is- and also having the option of looking for walls in other parts of the city- I’m thinking about all of the walls I’d love to create for all of the place I love in Seattle, but realize I’ll have to retrace my steps and see who else has come before me.

As far as the schema for the next rel… I like the idea of using colors, but am not as interested in the last post time. I’m thinking just a little dot next to the wall name (like if you have a new podcast in iTunes) so you know that there are “unread” wall posts. The distance from the wall could be color-coded for quick reference. But then again, my old iPhone won’t be getting the sweet pin-pointing features, so what does it matter to me!? ;)