Shortwave: iBeacon-powered messaging (opens in new tab)

I'm not sure if anonymous is the way to go like it is with shortwave. at least in applications I can imagine, something like Loopd would be more productive in finding the right people to chat with. looks like shortwave is like secret but for messaging - which could be interesting but also sounds like a chicken and egg thing.

I try to keep track of new contacts I meet in a google doc with info like name, where I met them, what they appeared to be (manager, secretary, etc), what they looked like... Way too much work and it's hard to look through. Can't wait for this app to be on Android! I keep hearing good things about it :)

Actually, I find loopd to be the most useful application of iBeacon I've personally used so far. It's been on my phone since monday and there are about 400 contacts already.

how is it going, ayhoung? are you one of developers?

It's not to be found in the AppStore. Have you geo-limited it to ensure you grow less? :)

[EDIT: my mistake, it was loopd not loopt]

Hi! I helped build Shortwave. There are some interesting limitations to the ibeacon and corebluetooth APIs that we used - corebluetooth can broadcast in the background (but not receive) while ibeacon can receive in the background (but not broadcast).

Our goal was to be able to recognize that two shortwave users were within range of each other, even if both phones were locked, so we had to find a way to make these two APIs work together.

I'm working on a blog post that details how we did this. I hadn't thought of open-sourcing the code, but people seem interested so I'm more than happy to do so. I do have to warn you - this was my first foray into objective-c, so I'm sure there will be some shortcomings :)

I'll post it to hackernews when I wrap it up. I'm also @alonsoholmes on twitter, in case it doesn't make the front page.

Cheers!

- ah

Hi, We are working in a project that also uses Bluetooth Low Energy for nearby interaction (though is not a chat). So we do some similar stuff to have Beacons advertising in the background. Due to the demand we saw here, we decided to open source our library which is called AltBeacon. You can find it in https://github.com/CharruaLabs/AltBeacon , we need contributors so feel free to check it and contribute.

It's actually very simple. We've released a much more featured version of this at http://getloopd.com

Yep. I believe Chrome is rated 17+ in the iOS store because people can visit arbitrary websites with it.

Really, though, the app age-ratings system would work much better flipped around. There are certain apps that either have no user-generated content/social interactions, or which restrict what user-generated content/social interactions they do have to being nonthreatening (usually by not allowing that many degrees of freedom in expression. thatgamecompany's Journey is a good example.)

Games that are safe for kids could ask Apple to give them additional vetting; Apple could then declare them to be explicitly "safe for children", put them on additional "For Kids" lists, etc. Unlike the current setup, there would be no such thing as an "adult" app--just an "unvetted" app. The parental controls, if turned on, would prompt a parent to independently evaluate unvetted apps.

You're pretty much spot-on. When you submit to the App Store, they give you boxes to tick for each potentially offensive type of content. If you have a lot of user-generated content, you tend to tick boxes that apply to content you think users might generate.

This really needs to be fixed - plenty of apps carry a rating that could fluctuate substantially, because users can write what they wish.

Yeah! Firechat came out while we we were building Shortwave.

They use the iOS multipeer API, which you should definitely check out. It can use infrastructure wifi, p2p wifi, or Bluetooth. The drawback is that it requires both apps to be in the foreground to establish a connection - think Airdrop.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Multip...

There's also a really good WWDC talk if you've got an iOS dev account.

I thought that used wifi/Bluetooth rather than iBeacons.

Yeah, I was disappointed to find that the name had nothing to do with the underlying technology or the actual use-case. It's just a super-short-range messaging app.

I agree it's a terrible screenshot. Without any context I have no idea what those icon -> icon dividers mean. I guess its someone changing their icon?

The battery and current time service I think is inherent to the iPhone, not necessarily whatever software is running. I've seen that a lot when doing totally unrelated BLE/iBeacon stuff. A... clever combination of CoreBluetooth and iBeacon is used for discovery, messaging is actually handled via data connection. We toyed with some ways to transfer data directly (multipeer and decidedly-not-multipeer), but we haven't used those in this release.