SnowMates for iPhone
As mentioned recently, I’ve been working on an iPhone app with a friend, James Raine. I didn’t want to talk about it until it was approved by Apple, until it was real. We submitted the app on 4th December – an email on the 15th told us that is was ready for sale…
The app is called SnowMates.
Why you should use SnowMates
It’s designed to help you and your friends meet up when you’re on a snowboarding holiday/trip. It’s a simple concept – a message board allowing you to post your plans.
- “We’ll be lapping the park until 13:00, stopping for lunch”
- “We’ll be using the blues on Peak 7″
- “We’ve gone up to Avoriaz, find us in the Prolays area”
I usually snowboard in a group, somewhere between 6 and 10 people. Not everyone goes up the hill at the same time in the morning, the group isn’t always together. But people do want to meet up – and communicating by phone doesn’t always work too well.
Your phone is in your pocket – you didn’t hear it ring. Now you’re on the lift, you check your phone and notice a missed call. You call back… but now they’re snowboarding so they miss the call.
A text message can help that situation – but there’s still an element of conversation. You normally ask something like “where are you guys”. Now you’re waiting for a response. Plus, you’ve got the problem of who to text. Everyone?
With a message board, you leave a note telling others what you’re doing. If they’re interested, they know who you’re with and where to find you. They don’t need to waste their time, or yours, trying to call.
“Coming down around 16:00 and heading to the bar for a pint”
What you need to know
A message board can be useful in a whole load of situations – I designed this one for use on the mountain. Personally, I’ve found communication with phones to be less than ideal: “why aren’t you answering your phone?!” The SnowMates app was designed with me and my friends in mind. It’s simple, but hopefully, effective.
Of course it’s only any good if two or more of you have an iPhone with the app.
The message composition is similar to Twitter, or a post on your Facebook Wall. So what’s the benefit of using SnowMates? It’s targeted. It’s a private message board for you and your snowboarding friends. Your plans to meet up aren’t lost in a sea of other messages. At the same time, you don’t spam Twitter or Facebook with comments that aren’t of use to people outside your group.
There’s also a handy little feature to quickly show who you’re with. You can see in the screen shot above that messages are tagged with names – when you post your plans we’ve made it easy to also indicate who you’re with. Again, it’s all about making it easy to coordinate on the hill.
If you want to take a look in the App Store, just click the image below…
You can aslo take a look at the Sicknote Software website. There’s not much there, but it does have the app description that’s in iTunes, some screenshots, and a small help page on how to use SnowMates.
Future developments
We developed SnowMates, now, for a few reasons:
- we believe a message board will help us when snowboarding, and hopefully others too
- we wanted experience in submitting an application to the App Store
- we wanted it to be available for this season
I’ve got no expectations for this. It’s been a learning experience, it’s been fun, and I hope some people find it useful. That’s it. There’s nothing concrete yet, but James was talking about a plan to release a version on Android…
We’re in the middle of working on a second project; that one is a secret, but I will say that it’s related to snowboarding.
I’d love to hear your feedback, good or bad, on SnowMates. If you’ve got any questions, just ask, I’ll do my best to answer them. And of course, if you want to download it and give it a try, be my guest 
Just remember you need a mate to read the messages you post on the message board…
Good on that Gavin – sounds like a neat little app; if I had an iPhone I’d definitely check it out
Hey David, cheers.
It is quite targeted, but I do think it could be useful for skiing and snowboarding groups. I noticed that there was a review of the Speed Aura app on your site recently. I’ve got it as well, I’m just waiting ’till I’m a little more mobile to test it out
If you do want to check out the SnowMates app – on a friend’s phone, or with friends – just let me know because I think I can get promo codes.
Cheers, Gav
Hi,
It looks from the onset like a really useful app… However, after some more reading as to how it works I’m a little dubious.
1. How do you update the the message board?
2. Does it use push notifications to indicate a more recent update?
I imagine that it requires an Internet connection to post a message which while abroad is at great cost and most will have data roaming turned off.
If that is the case, can you expect people to check for updates at an additional cost while abroad and paying upwards £3/mb for data. I’m sure the data usage is very low given it’s nature but it is still extra cost.
Can you text to update? If so, good but you will still need to check the message board which is at a cost and then reply, further cost.
It’s a great idea, if the mountains had wifi, even better. However, from how I interpret the apps usability you are beaten by the service providers and their high data roaming fees. Shame.
I wish you the best with the app.
Hey Matthew,
thanks for commenting, and thanks for the questions.
1. You update the message board by sending data to a server. As you expected, the amount of data sent is very small – as is the amount of data pulled to populate the message board.
Push notifications are not used to inform you of recent updates. That means you’re not pulling data when you don’t want to. The idea is to check the message board when you want to hook up. Of course, someone could change their plans, and you might proceed to a rendezvous without re-checking the board.
The app does require a connection to the Internet, edge, gprs, 3G, wi-fi… You’re right in thinking that if you’re abroad, that’s going to require data roaming.
There are two thoughts on this:
1. Yes, you’ve got to pay for data, but if you weren’t sending data, you’d be paying for the call or texts instead. This is unsubstantiated, but the data costs may well be less than calls/texts – due to the small amount of data being pulled, and _hopefully_ the increased efficiency of communication.
2. For users in the US, they should have less problems with data roaming charges. They’re in a better situation than people like me who live in the UK and will almost always be abroad when snowboarding.
Like I said, thanks for the questions. If you’d like, I could do a little calculation to work out how much data is sent/pulled when using the message board, and combine that with typical data roaming charges?
Cheers, Gavin
UPDATE ON DATA USAGE – DATA ROAMING
==========================
Thanks to Matthew, above, for his question about data roaming charges. Here’s a quick idea of what usage you can get for your money. O2 for example, charge £3 / MB. Vodafone charge £1 / MB for the 5 MBs, then £5 / MB thereafter.
So – here’s an example of how much use you will get out of 1MB.
1 MB is approximately 200 refreshes of the message board. That’s based on fairly long messages.
If you’re going away for a two week holiday, with 13 days of riding, that’s around 15 pulls of the message board each day.
That should be cheaper than calling or texting, and the idea is that the communication is more effective.
Whilst we think this is pretty good, and stacks up well against texting and calling, it’s something we’re going to improve further with a new release of the app.
If you want to know more, just ask.