Meetro for Mac testers
I ran into some guys from Meetro at Evening at Adler, and over the last while have been playing with the alpha version for the Mac. The idea behind Meetro is fairly simple -- input your location, such as your address or GPS coordinates, and see who the hell else is around you...
Location-awareness is interesting, if a little odd just thrown into an app by its lonesome, however on the whole it's always nice to see someone throwing together a Mac app instead of only allowing them access through a web service or something (which is a part of it)...
It's absolutely horrifying in terms of UI. I started whipping up a list, but it's just one thing after another and it's hard to know where to start without just writing "start over." From A to Z, whatever nugget of coolness might be discovered is hidden by horror-show dialogs or fields you don't know are editable or fields that aren't editable that look as though you can change them... Almost invariably, if there is a right and wrong thing to do, they're going in the wrong direction.
Some of them are things where it's an alpha, some of them are things where you just know a programmer is having to hash all of this out in interface builder, and it's destined to become a slide in a powerpoint presentation on why programmers often shouldn't be designing the interface. I almost wish I didn't like these guys, because then I could just go nuts on it without skewing my karma.
I actually had the profile pages show up in a dream the other night, which means my brain is really wigged by it. I want to flat-out strangle a few of the dialog boxes, as o.m.g. does Meetro love showing you dialog boxes.
- It seems to be well-coded, at least judging by its resource usage and that it hasn't gone all crashy on me as an alpha.
- In talking to these guys, I really think they want to have a good Mac app and do right by Mac users. They're really cool guys.
- If you know your way around the HIG or IB, you can help.
They're taking in a few hundred Mac testers into the private alpha, to find problems, get feedback and suggestions and such. Email mac@meetro.com with your city and state, and if you're one of the first few hundred you're in. If you know your way around the HIG and miss Perversion Tracker, do ping them, although you can sign up just to use it normally and give feedback too.
Posted by drunkenbatmanDecember 15, 2005, at 10:56 AM
Comments (14)
Posted by: Clint Ecker at December 15, 2005 12:25 PM
From my limited usage, it tries to guess your general location from your IP. You can then clarify and make the location more precise by submitting your current address (which it converts to lat/longs and skews slightly) if you choose.
I also think that it stores those coordinates for some unique IPs and will reuse them when those IPs reappear, but I can't be certain.
Posted by: C. Koerner at December 15, 2005 01:48 PM
This also sounds similar to a software called Jambo (jambo.net). It's an IM client too, and you can see who's nearby (on a local network) and what thier similarity to your interests are. Pretty neat stuff, and the developers are pretty cool guys too. They were on my college campus a while ago talking about their stuff.
Posted by: miamimike at December 15, 2005 05:28 PM
I have downloaded this and quite enjoy it so far compared to the other 2 moentioned. I think Jambo's offering is quite poor and you can only meet people within 300 feet. As for Plazes, I'm confused as to how you can say their client is comparable. All the Plazes thing does is server as a daemon. Or am I confused?
Posted by: Antonis at December 15, 2005 06:41 PM
Hey guys, I'm the Mac dev for the app.
DB, man you're harsh! You were nicer to me during our chat! There is an absolute scarcity of controls on the client to begin with, where did you see so many issues??
You must have been drunk when writing the blog :p
Now I see where the handle comes from!
Ok enough joking. Thank you for all the positive feedback and comments. I hope you liked the .5mb download and general minimalism :)
Anyways, here's what I'd like to say:
The profiles are horrible on purpose, because they're absolutely temporary, and under the muggy Chicago weather there wasn't much more that could have been done.
Now, for the "editable textfields" that are "non-editable", you only mentioned to me the status field, DB. The reason for that is that on internal versions you can actually type stuff in there. But as you suggested, the online/away/offline menu item will be widened to show status, as opposed to using a separate textfield.
Anyways, in general we're open to suggestions and ideas (graphic images obviously speak louder), but please keep in mind there are always alternative reasons for doing certain things, and usually those reasons are internal (for example, certain behavioural choices were made because we use and abuse Meetro everyday, so to a casual user they might appear as random choices, but the fact is that, for example, the Dock icon bounces ALL the time (once again, that will be an option to enable/disable/tweak), because I get so many messages that if I didn't have that at the moment, I'd be missing a lot of them). Oh, and it's an alpha :)
Last thing I'd like to mention is that we have an FAQ on our web site, which explains some of the questions some of you might have had, even though it's a little Windoze centric at the time. And a final explanation: we use MACs and IPs to locate your location, if unknown you can supply your location, but if known, then it's automatic (a la Mac desktop syncing with your work/home location).
That's it, and thanks for checking it out and all your feed back! We hope that you TOO can find the utility in this idea, as we recently found out: this guy down the street actually gave us his vacuum because ours is broken, and with 7 people packed in a tiny appartment, it tends to get really dirty, really quick! :)
PS. He did get beers in exchange, so if you have some cool hardware... :)
Posted by: Antonis at December 15, 2005 07:02 PM
I forgot: MiamiMike is correct in his comments about Jambo.
Their software works only if you're on the same access point. Ours goes beyond that, because obviously it's more possible to stop a neutrino with your bare hand than locate strangers on the same access point running the same software :)
Also we offer much more involved profiles, location information, and automation at the moment, and also in the win32 client we have multi-IM capability so you can also see and talk to your buddies from AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, and soon Jabber networks. This will also be coming to the Mac client. Also Jambo is... well, did anyone play with it? You have to click on a button to "refresh" who's around you...
Our client is automatic and real time from the get go. Minimal clicking allowed.
Plazes is more like our client, yet it's quite a bit NOT the same. First of all it's a Menu Item, AFAIK, not a stand alone client. The realtime aspects, proximity granularity, interactivity, multi-IM and social network aspects are also minimal from our perspective.
Do try them out, by all means, and please tell us what you'd like to see us do, although we do a vision and ideas which we think you will all enjoy very much once we bring them out there..
take care
Posted by: drunkenbatman at December 15, 2005 09:16 PM
Antonis,
DB, man you're harsh! You were nicer to me during our chat! There is an absolute scarcity of controls on the client to begin with, where did you see so many issues??
Heh, I don't think I was being that harsh -- just honest as I see it. The alternative would have been not to comment on it all and point people towards it, but, hey, the site archives were available before it was forwarded onto me as fair warning. I can like you guys and still think the UI as it currently stands is a rare train-wreck.
Ok enough joking. Thank you for all the positive feedback and comments. I hope you liked the .5mb download and general minimalism :)
Very much so -- my saying something seems well-coded isn't something I say lightly.
Now, for the "editable textfields" that are "non-editable", you only mentioned to me the status field, DB.
I mentioned that as an example, but also said there were a ton of things. As for "editable textfields that are actually editable", take a look at this screenshot of where one edits their own profile -- what fields on this profile are editable at a glance (ignore that meetro wants to tell me I'm very close to myself)?
Now, take a look at this screenshot of someone else's profile -- what fields are or aren't editable (ignoring the uber-creepy profile pic)?
If there's a drop-down list next to say, links, I'd expect that some change/action/modification takes place by selecting them...
Posted by: erikh at December 15, 2005 10:15 PM
Jesus DB, got enough icons on your dock?
Posted by: Abhi Beckert at December 16, 2005 12:11 AM
I'm both a cocoa developer and have fairly good HI skills, if I had the time I would help out (at least by alpha testing it).
Unfortunately I don't have time. :(
Posted by: drunkenbatman at December 16, 2005 12:49 AM
Jesus DB, got enough icons on your dock?
I'm very, very backed up. First person to invent info-fiber wins 10,000 points.
Posted by: Antonis at December 16, 2005 01:24 AM
Yes the profile is a nasty UI maze. It's also very temporary :) It was never meant to be a final version.
As for the program saying "very close" to yourself, that's not UI and/or design, that's a bug :) Thanks for pointing out. Fixed.
Abhi, and anyone else, if you're interested in alpha testing, please drop us an email at mac_at_meetro.com and give us your city/state.
Posted by: Blake Burris at December 16, 2005 12:37 PM
There's some great value in location services that someone will unlock for the masses. I hope you guys can nail it in terms of user experience. Plazes and Dodgeball are trying but neither are someting the masses are going to jump on, imho. I'm looking forward to tinkering soon.
Posted by: Skatch at December 19, 2005 05:42 AM
What are the chances of turning this into an Adium plug-in? I like the idea. Unfortunately to be harsh but frank, the chances of me running a second IM client are approaching zero. Whether or not I'm a typical user I leave to the Meetro devs to decide, but I think it's an idea worth discussing. Adium is just now becoming an able iChat replacement for the general consumer now that Gizmo has a voice chat plugin for it. I would think it's the software platform to hook onto if you want to have a chance of gaining traction on the Mac.
Posted by: jambodev at January 11, 2006 08:30 PM
Hi. I'm the developer for the Jambo mac client. Thought I'd drop in and lend some understanding of what Jambo does.
Jambo automatically detects who is nearby on any hotspot in proximity, up to 6 blocks away - which is far ensure a lot of connections, but it is close enough to still be within walking distance for them to meet up in person. Jambo works online and offline, so you can even use it on an airplane flight at 30,000 feet.
We are not trying to replace IM. We want to bring people together face-to-face, so they can put away the technology and interact in the real world. The purpose of our IM is to help people determine where to meetup face-to-face. The IM part is actually the most commoditized part of what we do. Our core competency is matching people together and automatically detecting when the people they want to meet are within
proximity.
We are selling to affinity groups such as online communities,
conferences, universities, associations and wifi hotspots. Macworld Expo 2006 has partnered with us to introduce their attendees with those they want to meet in proximity. It was fun to meet The Batman of Drunkness in person here at the show.
If you have any questions, you can drop me a line at jay at heynow dot com.
Rock on.
Sounds exactly like Plazes. Except I like the Plazes Mac client better... ;)
Does it tie in with your current Network connection or do you have to select the Location manually every time?