Flur

An iOS app that lets users find and contribute to geo-cached photo albums all over the world.

iOS

Geo-Cache

The Problem

For my Senior Design project, I was tasked with identifying a problem and solving it with technology. After considering a handful of ideas, my teammates and I kept returning to one of the great ironies of technology: it has simultaneously connected individuals to the broader world in an unprecedented fashion while making it extremely easy to feel disconnected from those closest to you. We've all been to a restaurant and seen a group of friends glued to their phones. The question was, how do we leverage technology to both:

1. Engage users with their surrounding physical environment.
2. Engage users with the people in your area.

The Idea

Users fire up the Flur application and first see a map of their current city. Overlaid on the map, they see a series of icons, each of which is an individual Flur. A Flur is a geocache of photos submitted by all application users who have visited that Flur. You can view all the photos at a Flur, and submit your own photo once you're within 50 feet of the Flur.

Each Flur additionally has a prompt associated with it. For example, the first Flur ever created prompted users to take a picture of themselves and a stranger. This gave each Flur a unique identity and further created a bond between all contributors to the Flur.

You could also see a history of all the Flurs you created and contributed to.

Technical Details

We built the application with the following technologies:

1. Objective-C for our client-side code.
2. Parse for our backend storage and geocache processing.
3. Cocoapods for our dependency manager.

Using Parse made it super easy to store geo data and process it, such as finding a set of nodes closest to a geo point. We spent most of our time working on features and building our MVP instead of grappling with technical challenges in the geo space. Although Parse is limiting by nature, it was a great fit for what we wanted to do.

Nate Rubin

Flur

An iOS app that lets users find and contribute to geo-cached photo albums all over the world.

iOS

Geo-Cache

The Problem

For my Senior Design project, I was tasked with identifying a problem and solving it with technology. After considering a handful of ideas, my teammates and I kept returning to one of the great ironies of technology: it has simultaneously connected individuals to the broader world in an unprecedented fashion while making it extremely easy to feel disconnected from those closest to you. We've all been to a restaurant and seen a group of friends glued to their phones. The question was, how do we leverage technology to both:

1. Engage users with their surrounding physical environment.
2. Engage users with the people in your area.

The Idea

Users fire up the Flur application and first see a map of their current city. Overlaid on the map, they see a series of icons, each of which is an individual Flur. A Flur is a geocache of photos submitted by all application users who have visited that Flur. You can view all the photos at a Flur, and submit your own photo once you're within 50 feet of the Flur.

Each Flur additionally has a prompt associated with it. For example, the first Flur ever created prompted users to take a picture of themselves and a stranger. This gave each Flur a unique identity and further created a bond between all contributors to the Flur.

You could also see a history of all the Flurs you created and contributed to.

Technical Details

We built the application with the following technologies:

1. Objective-C for our client-side code.
2. Parse for our backend storage and geocache processing.
3. Cocoapods for our dependency manager.

Using Parse made it super easy to store geo data and process it, such as finding a set of nodes closest to a geo point. We spent most of our time working on features and building our MVP instead of grappling with technical challenges in the geo space. Although Parse is limiting by nature, it was a great fit for what we wanted to do.