Pausing Launch Here and Travel Radar

We decided to pause our apps Launch Here and Travel Radar. This means we will pull them from the AppStore shortly. In their current state they don’t fulfil our own expectations for quality, so we’d rather not want anybody to purchase them and being disappointed.

Our resources are very limited. In the last couple of weeks it became clear that we have to make sacrifices to stay motivated, focused and keep moving forward.

We still believe in the use cases for both apps. In fact we were working on significantly improved new versions for quite a while. We hoped to have a smoother transition but developing the new versions simply took longer than expected. Pulling the apps will help us removing maintenance pressures and avoid false expectations regarding upcoming releases.

If you purchased one of the apps recently and feel unhappy with this move, please feel free to make use of Apples’s app refund option – no problem.

This is a step we didn’t take lightly. But after going back and forth on this over and over again in the last couple of weeks it does feel right. We hope for your understanding.

app, ibeacon

Introducing Nexts

Nexts is two things – A clock for events and an iBeacon.

Re-imagening the Wall Mounted Clock

We wanted to create an app that provides enough value and is so unobtrusive that even using it as an always-on display doesn’t feel wrong. As a side effect this allows Nexts to double as iBeacon based location tag and trigger for other context-aware applications.

See what’s next, at a glance

Analogue clock faces have a very distinct appeal. They allow you to understand time intervals to upcoming events at a single glance. We combine this immediacy with additional information layers carefully balancing attention, distraction and information.

Nexts works best when you run it on a dedicated iPad or iPod touch placed in a shared enviromnment like your kitchen or workspace.

You can see the title of an event by tapping on it but Nexts main mode of operation is intended to be non-interactive. It’s about getting a feeling for your day, not micro-managing events.

Nexts as iBeacon

Since releasing Launch Here we constantly receive one question

Which iBeacon should I get?

We struggle with a good answer. While there are some really great stand-alone iBeacons, we still don’t see them whole-heartedly embracing consumers and “home” use cases. Furthermore there are numerous iBeacon emitter apps, but nothing we would keep running any longer than absolutely necessary. That however makes their use as context marker unfeasible.

Nexts provides you with a simple alternative to get started with iBeacons enabling your to start exploring use cases right away.

You will notice that the kitchen and workspaces are great places to tag. Both offer numerous meaningful use cases for context based activities and app usage.

iBeacon functionality in Nexts can be turned on in the Menu. We are using Open Beacon Credentials for specifying the beacon identity. This enables a one-tap setup process in compatible apps like Launch Here. If you like to use Nexts as a trigger in other apps, you might be interested in its plain-vanilla iBeacon identifiers. No secrects:

UUID AA6062F0-98CA-4211-8EC4-193EB73CEBE6 Major 100 Minor 701

Yes, it’s free ★彡

Nexts is a free app. iBeacon functionality is right there when you open the menu, also the Reminders layer is a free in-app download. The Calendar layer comes as a paid in-app purchase – we’d appreciate your support with this.

Start exploring where Nexts might fit into your life. We’d love to hear from you. Find more information on our app page.

Nexts is now available on the AppStore.

app, ibeacon, nexts, release

Supported iBeacons

Here’s a list of iBeacons we officially support in our apps. With these iBeacons auto-detection will work out of the box making the setup as simple as a single tap.

If your iBeacon is not in this list you can still make it work by changing its ID according to our Open Beacon Credentials guide.

Our goal is to make our apps work with as many iBeacon vendors as possible. But please understand that our capacity for testing different beacons is limited. In case you have issues making your iBeacon work, please let us know. We’ll do our best to help out.

ibeacon, support