android

We’ve added Google Gears support to both www.shizzow.com and m.shizzow.com to help auto-detect your location!

How does it work?  If you have Gears installed, you will be prompted to allow Shizzow to access information about your device.

Gears will attempt to auto-detect your location when you visit your Shizzow dashboard.  On Android phones it will use a combination of GPS, wi-fi triangulation and/or cell tower triangulation, while on most other devices it will use wi-fi triangulation.  If Gears can pinpoint your current latitude and longitude, it will hand that data to Shizzow, which will display a list of nearby places.

Visit gears.google.com to install Gears and to determine if Gears is installed on your device.

If Gears cannot tell precisely where you are at, it will typically place you in the center of the nearest major city.

As always, feedback is most welcome at GetSatisfaction.

It’s been a long time since our last Tweaks of the ‘Week’ post. With all of the refactoring happening in preparation for the Shizzow API, we held off on deploying anything new on the old code. While the API beta stole most of the thunder during our update this weekend, you might have noticed that we also snuck in a few cool improvements. Again, this is just more proof that we actually read all of the stuff you send us through Get Satisfaction.

Staying Connected

We added some information in the sidebar about how to stay connected to Shizzow with SMS, IM and Apps. We’ve found that new users (and some who have been around a while) don’t realize how many ways there are to keep up with your friends on Shizzow in addition to the web interface. This is also where we will be adding information about new applications as people build them with the new beta API.

More Entries in our RSS Feeds

OK, this change came mostly from my complaints. Our original RSS feeds had only 10 elements, and I wanted to do some filtering with Yahoo Pipes, but items kept rolling out of the feed too quickly. I convinced Ryan to up the RSS feeds to have 25 items.

Add to Favorites on m.shizzow.com

We had a little bug on m.shizzow.com that was preventing people from adding favorites using the mobile phone interface. We fixed this bug as part of the last update.

Beta API

As I mentioned earlier, we also rolled out a private beta for the Shizzow API, and we have several people already starting to work on applications. We even had our first API shout from an Android phone last night. If you are interested in doing development with the beta API, you can email dawn at shizzow.com to get an invite. Another way to get involved is by attending the Shizzow Developers Meetup on Thursday.

Since the refactoring for the API resulted in code changes across most areas of Shizzow, this release may have introduced a few more bugs. We can only fix the issues that we know about (our telepathic abilities are severely limited), so keep those bug reports and feature requests coming at us by posting them on Get Satisfaction!