What’s Next?

Obviously, Who’s Here? is an inexpensive app. But the price wasn’t set low because it isn’t useful. It’s inexpensive because Development (me) needs user input to better discover what your needs are. On the current list of enhancements are:

  • Phone and address book integration. There will be times when you will want to add a person to your real address book or when you will want to make a phone call to that person. These are convenience features for a future release.

  • Mapping support. You may want to see a map to the location of the event. Again, not the most common occurrence, but a convenience feature.

  • Cloud integration. This is the “big deal” feature. This would have a multi-part benefit: It would allow you to have more than one checkin station and the devices would stay in sync. How many times have you arrived at an event where you had to stand in a line for people whose last names start with A-F, G-J, etc.? And of course you always wound up in the longest line, right? Well, this would allow anybody doing checkin to handle parties irrespective of their last names. Well, ok, not completely: If you need to give out personalized events packets, you may still need to do some of this, but otherwise cloud sync’ed devices will help you distribute the process across multiple points of entry and long lines at a checkin counter.

  • Web integration. As lovely as our iPhones and iPads are, typing a ton of names into them can prove tedious. Not as bad as I thought (I’ve done this a ton of times in developing and testing the app), but still not as easy as your good old computer keyboard for entering attendee data.

  • Registration integration. There is a case to be made for self-registering events. One where you create an event in the yet-to-be-created Web application, then publish a link to a list of your friends and they can register, provide party size information, and so on. This isn’t as much of a timesaver as you might imagine, as you still need to create the original list of invitees. That translates to keyboard time.