alan wells

So after spending some time to migrate my blog from a $90/year hosted Typepad account to my self-hosted Wordpress install (since I’ve spent the last 6 months learning the basics of PHP this seemed much easier when I first looked into it last year), upgrading to WP 2.5, I’m finding myself inspired to start writing some things here again. Since I like to use this blog as a record of my own thoughts and work, I thought I’d share some recent work I’ve done. Last week we launched some new features on the Affinity Labs sites, probably the biggest release I’ve managed so far, and I’m pretty excited about the new UI we’ve created for our some of our channel pages and our article pages. First, the old design (thanks Google cache!)

And the new design:

isolation

Originally uploaded by alanwells

One of my favorite photos from college.

During the summer of 2007, my roommate Porter Felton and I had an idea about where mobile technology might be going. It was before the release of the iPhone SDK, but the potential of mobile, location aware technology was still very clear. We began working on an idea for a location aware service that would find the most popular events around you based on popularity within your group of friends.

We decided not to pusue the business idea after looking at a number of other companies doing similar things (Loopt, Whirled, etc), but not before I designed and coded a working prototype for nightlife destinations in San Francisco. I learnd basic PHP and MySQL to write this site, which has CSS skins for both iPhone and desktop browsers. You could link it up with your Facebook account to see venues your friends were attending, and see lists of venues ranked by proximity and popularity.

Doing all this in a web browser seems rather quaint now that the iPhone SDK is available, but at the time I wrote the prototype, Safari was the only place for app developers to make iPhone services.

The prototype is still functional (except for the Set My Location address mapping feature), and can be accessed at www.gettoutt.com