Andrew Vilcsak

City of Edmonton iPhone Application

The City of Edmonton app that I’ve been dabbling with for the last couple days is just about ready to roll. Heading to an app store near you for the low, low price of free.

Internship time!

My first summer of being legally allowed to work in the US is quickly approaching, and the internship hunt is in full force. I’ve got an offer in Toronto, two offers and one lead in SF and an offer in NY, and I literally have no idea what to do. I had two awesome meetings today, and as great as they were, they confused me even more. Help?

Haiti, Haiti, Haiti.

[redacted]

Frack, sometimes I hate my brain. Just for once, I wish it should shut up, go away and leave me alone. I don’t want to think right this very moment, I want to sleep. My brain is, however, of course unable to comprehend this. Sigh.

A bit of a doozy.

MyStops hasn’t been fully working for everybody for about the last week or so, and for this, I apologize. I’ve been stupid busy with projects and freelance work and really just haven’t had the time to sit down and dig into it. Thankfully, I found some time tonight, and did a bit of a hacky fix to get everything back working. For those of you just scanning, MyStops is now yet again fully functional. Because of the way things have been fixed, the card refreshes will run a little bit slow. I’m going to be taking a deeper look for the next couple hours and see if I can get everything wrapped up and functioning perfectly.

Because of this, and the timely release of FusedLogic’s latest app, I’m going to also put together a much-needed application update, which should hit the store within the next week or two. While I’m not entirely sure what it’ll contain, I know it will have:

• Add stops through a map interface, instead of needing to know the stop number (which nobody knows anyways)
• Significant speed increases
• Fixes for a couple people that have been having crashes instantly upon loading the app
• A few other fixes and improvements

I’ll also be looking into adding a new theme or two, and investigating adding some more trip planning-esque features, but these may or may not make it into the next version. Again, my apologies for the particularly shitty technical support.

I’m really flipping tired of final exams. It feels like my life has been nothing but a constant stream of stress and disappointment for the last 2 weeks, and I can only take so much. My last exam is done at 11am today. Following this, substantial consumption of alcohol will ensue. I should be back in a functioning state by late Sunday afternoon.

Hello.

My name is Andrew, and I have a business card obsession.

Don’t know about these ones though. They feel a tad egotistical. Kinda like ‘HEY! HEY YOU! LOOK AT MY NAME!’-ish.

Wait, so why Foursquare?

A certain Sean Healy has been tweeting a ton lately about why everybody’s been getting so giddy about Foursquare, when other ‘games’ such as Brightkite have been around forever and nobody seemed to care about them. Honestly, I have no idea why, but I feel the exact same way. I’ve known about Brightkite for a while, and haven’t had even as much as a hint of desire to create an account, yet I just about lost it when I found out Foursquare was finally available in Edmonton. WHY?

Brightkite:

• Looks hella better
• Has a bigger database of locations
• Is all around way more polished and well though-out

Yet, take a look at Brightkite, and then take a look at Foursquare. There’s infinitely more people in Edmonton using Foursquare than Brightkite. They’ve even wrangled in a fairly hefty 1.4 million in venture capital.

So what the hell makes Foursquare so special?

1. The site has (in my opinion) a much more ‘gamier’ feel. I look at Brightkite, I think “yet another Twitter clone”, where as when I look at foursquare, I think it looks hella fun. I can’t wait to go get super drunk and post checkin’s 900 times across the entire city.
2. There wasn’t any marketing (in the traditional sense) that I saw, but the hype it generated on Twitter was fairly impressive. See point three.
3. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, we had to wait. There’s something about being forced to wait that makes anybody want it even more. I would’ve assumed that people would have simply turned to a competitor instead of waiting, but clearly, that wasn’t the case.

Maybe foursquare isn’t all that much better, and we’re just half-way through a week-long fad that will be gone by the time anybody reads this blog post.

In summary: Create a semi-awesome product that looks like a game, and whatever you do, don’t let 75% of the population use it. I think all of my future projects will be based off of this simple, yet apparently effective strategy.