Making iPhone app, need GWC help!

GWC Community GWC Hive Mind
#1

So I’m writing an app for the iPhone and I need a little help from y’all if you have any ideas. The basic premise: It’s a time traveler’s emergency reference. The idea is that if you happen to be thrown backwards in time, it’s a useful app to have on your phone containing a comprehensive world history (I’ve been working on this for a while, have about 100,000 entries of events, notable births, and notable deaths going back about 1,500 years) plus a selection of useful documents that you can use to create an empire for yourself and/or be a successful entrepreneur by being able to invent various useful things.

Ideas:
Various bootstrap documents about metalworking
Basic inventions appropriate to different time periods
Glassworking
Antibiotics and medical diagrams
etc.

I’ve already got most of this working. The history stuff is functional, and the screen with useful docs is working but scarce.

WHAT I NEED:
Some ideas and/or URLs to useful pages to include offline. Remember, there’s very little internet access in, say, the 1700s, so I want to convert a bunch of pages to PDF and store them on the machine if I can get them compressed well-enough. I’m looking for content that’s released under a license compatible with this, such as Creative Commons. I don’t intend to ‘snarf’ anything that isn’t available for free distribution so I can respect the wishes of the creators. WikiHow has a bunch of stuff, I’ve been looking through that, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what’s the most useful.

So tell me:
What subject matters would YOU, as a lost time traveler, want to have available as reference? What inventions, what techniques, etc? Even if you don’t have URLs to CC-licensed content for the stuff you’d like to have, let me know what it is because maybe I or someone else can find something that fits the bill. And if you DO have a URL, shucks, fire away!

I know this sounds dorky… but I think it’d be a fun thing to have.

Also, it makes the various Ziggy handlink style sound fx from Quantum Leap when you hit it, of course.

Thanks!

#2

Probably the most important thing I can think of is how to fashion a power source for recharging your phone. I really like the idea of being worshipped as a god by primitive people, but it’ll all go to hell quickly if you can’t figure out how to power your iPhone with a Baghdad battery or a lightning-charged Ark of the Covenant capacitor. :slight_smile:

#3

EXCELLENT idea. Noted!

#4

Reminds me of the Time Travel Essentials T-Shirt.

This blog discussion on Time Travel got a lot of play a few years back. It even inspired a song.

#5

Well I can only speak for myself and being a man, of course the basics of human needs are Food, Shelter and Sex. Let’s forget the first two for the moment.

How about some Dating Tips for various time periods?

For example:

  • If stuck in Ancient England, keep in mind that the Tomato was largely thought to be poisonous until sometime in the 1600s, so you may not want to serve that Eggplant Parmesan to your date.

  • Make certain of your mate’s lineage before throwing her in the hay pile (or whatever serves as a lovemaking platform), you’ll want to avoid becoming your own Grandpa.

#6

Also, before committing the nasty in the past-y, one might want to consider that smallpox, bubonic plague, and consumption could easily be passed as venereal diseases, and treatment would be difficult, if not impossible.

So, um… choose wisely. :eek:

Also, assuming Terminator rules for time travel, instructions for safely taking your iPhone internally (one way or another) and having it still work afterward might be helpful.

#7

Good advice, guys! Yeah, definitely looking to put some penicillin identification & growing instructions in.

#8

More songs about time travel.

#9

Ok, I think I’m just about done, barring a massive re-write of the entire gorram thing.

Anyone want to beta-test? I’m using testflightapp.com for testing, it’s a pretty easy way to get beta apps over-the-air without using iTunes or anything. If you’re game to see what kind of crap I made or hit your phone so you can make Ziggy noises, then PM me your e-mail address and I’ll send an invite.

I managed to get the historical database down to under 7 megs, which I’m pretty tickled about. SQLite is funky, even thought I was dumping tables and starting over from scratch, at one point the DB ballooned to over 15 megs. I guess that’s not unreasonable for, you know, 1500 years of history, but still… geesh.

:smiley:

#10

Any iOS version requirements?

#11

I set the min version to 3.0.

#12

After playing with the beta a bit, I’ve noticed something that could be very helpful to have and very dangerous to lack: calendar conversion. There really needs to be an easy way to switch between Gregorian and Julian calendar dates. Depending on when, as well as where, you end up, you’ll probably need Roman AUC, Hebrew and Muslim lunar calendars, and a variety of non-European calendars at a bare minimum. You certainly don’t want to be sitting in Pompeii in 79 AD thinking everything is fine because the locals don’t know Anno Domini.

That should be easy to add in there, right? :slight_smile:

Otherwise, looks great so far.

#13

Calendar conversion! I like it, I’ll see what I can find. Thanks for the feedback! I think it’s just about there, I hope to submit it to the App Store this weekend. After that, I hear it’s something like two weeks before it gets put up, and that’s assuming they don’t reject it.

#14

PUBLISHED! It’s on the iTunes store, thanks for the suggestions! And super thanks to the folks that helped test, I’ve sent all y’all that helped with the Beta a code for a free copy that won’t expire.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ziggys-time-traveler-emergency/id421691157?mt=8&ls=1#

Achievement unlocked: Published to App Store!

Next: Gotta port to Android.

#15

Jawsome, Sir!

#16

Man. I’ve really got to update my iOS.

#17

Use the code I emailed you, you should be able to just install it off the app store!

Shucks, you’ll be my confirmation that it works on 3.x too, heh. It’s SUPPOSED to!

#18

Thanks! And super thanks for your help too, good sir!

#19

I’ve done a few updates since this thread, and now I’m working on a new feature idea I wanted to rub by y’all.

Idea: Universe detector.

Again, still going for the legit novelty aspect, eg it’s not some ‘PADD’ app that just makes noises and acts silly, it tries to play it straight no matter how unlikely the circumstances surrounding a feature are.

So, back to brainstorming, the Universe Detector feature idea I have is that I’ll incorporate a series of canned tests that can be performed within the phone to help someone determine if they’ve possibly arrived in a universe/timeline/etc that’s not the same as the one they started in.

Example: Eating some pi. Let’s say there’s an option to set a baseline. You press a button and the app generates an arbitrary number of digits of Pi (either say, a million or a user configurable amount) calculating it out mathematically. The further you go in a universal constant like this, the finer the ‘resolution’ of the number, right? So now you have this baseline established, a stored value that was generated in a known-good universe. Now, something happens. Maybe you have a doubt about the world, yourself, or just want to play with this feature on the app, so you click an option to ‘Validate universe’. It generates the same number of digits of pi and compares them against the stored value. If there’s a difference (and reasonably, I can see how in a slightly different universe, maybe a circle is just Different with a capital D enough for the math to work differently, so when the app realizes that the two don’t match, it can say something. “Hey, this might be a glitch or something, but I didn’t get the same result as last time”, basically. Anyone here read Anathem? [spoiler]Think about the laser that wasn’t right.[/spoiler] It’s one of those things.

So Pi is one example, anyone have any others? It’s gotta be a physical constant that I can conceivably calculate or measure with the phone. I thought about measuring gravity, but it’s actually different depending on where you are on the earth, for example, but maybe even so there’s SOMETHING I can do with that.

Ideas?

#20

How about working with the camera/flash and measure the speed of light?