Bump 1.3 available now, App Store approval in 14 hours!
Congrats to the winners of the Bump API Developers' Contest: CheckOut, CloudNote, and SocialFuse, and to all the finalists! Check them all out here.
We're working on lots of new stuff for the Bump app, and we want your feedback! Sign up at the link below to join our beta tester group to get an advanced look at new features. We'll select as many beta testers as we can and email you with instructions for how to download and install beta versions of the app and submit your feedback.
We're gearing up for the public release of the Bump API for iPhone, and we are excited to start seeing apps on the App Store using Bump in lots of interesting ways. To demonstrate how the Bump API works, we built a simple game that uses Bump to connect two devices to play head-to-head.
These are some ideas that the Bump Team would love to see someone build using Bump. Let us know if one of these areas is your cup of tea.
Dating: Dating sites today let people browse for matches online and then set up meetings in the real world. That's great, but wouldn't it been cool if you could know right when you meet someone new whether you are compatible? You bump, and your phone tells you "You and Jane are 83% compatible, you both listen to Radiohead, you grew up 10 miles from each other, and you both enjoy rockclimbing. Go talk".
Social Games: Gaming is becoming more social, we all see that. But what new kinds of games can be created with an easy way to identify and connect two phones right next to each other? How about Bump Kevin Bacon -- how many degrees are you from Kevin Bacon and can you bump your way to a 2nd degree connection? Or how about a "break-the-ice" game where each person enters a few interesting facts about themselves and then you have to go around talking to and bumping people to fill out your game board with people's interesting facts?
Group / Party Games: Multi-player games are great, but they are a real pain to set up with a large number of players. What about a poker app where you can actually play with your buddies while sitting around a table, but you don't have to deal with chips and shuffling cards? You could bump to join the table. What other kinds of games could you build?
Cloud file sharing: Lots of us keep all our important documents in the cloud. We like to share those files with people. But today the way it typically works is, "oh yeah, remind me to send you that document when I get back to my desk". With Bump, you can share files in the cloud immediately, while in the moment.
Virtual Goods: Sharing virtual goods or giving virtual gifts is popular these days. What if you could give a virtual gift in a non-virtual way, by physically giving the item to a friend with a bump?
Music discovery: One of the most common ways of discovering music is through recommendations from friends. Wouldn't it be great if there was an app that could look at two people's music libraries and recommend -- based on their own music and listening data -- which of their friend's favorite bands they should check out? Bonus points for a mashup with last.fm.
We've determined two root causes of the rare crashes we've been seeing on the new version of Bump. To avoid the crashes, please ensure that:
We are finding that our latest Bump release, version 1.21 on iTunes, is crashing on a very small fraction of Apple devices. If this is happening on your device, it would help us immensely if you could send us the crash report generated on your device. Here are the instructions:
Mac OS X: ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\<DEVICE_NAME>
Windows Vista: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\<DEVICE_NAME>
When an application crashes on the iPhone or iPod touch, a "crash report" is stored on the device. Crash reports describe the conditions under which the application terminated, in most cases including a complete stack trace for each executing thread, and are typically very useful for debugging issues in the application.
When the user synchronizes their device using iTunes, crash reports are copied to a directory on the user's computer. If the application was distributed via the App Store and the user has chosen to submit crash logs to Apple, the crash log will be uploaded and the developer can download it via iTunes Connect. For applications that have been distributed using Ad Hoc or Enterprise methods, getting crash reports requires user cooperation. Specifically, the user will need to retrieve the crash report from the directory where it was copied by iTunes. Depending on the platform, the directory is:
Mac OS X: ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice/<DEVICE_NAME>
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<USERNAME>\Application Data\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\<DEVICE_NAME>
Windows Vista: C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\<DEVICE_NAME>
<USERNAME> is the user's login name for the computer. <DEVICE_NAME> is the name of the iPod touch or iPhone, for example, "John's iPhone".
You are only interested in .crash files. The crash report's file name begins with the application name and contains date/time information. In addition, <DEVICE_NAME> will appear at the end of the file name, before the extension.
Thanks! This will help us immensely.
-David
Happy Bump Day, everyone. Our friends over at MagicSolver have made a cool Advent App to publicize their top 25 favorite apps. Today's gift is Bump!
