Get Over Here: A WebApp
Its on the Internet
Late last night I saw something dumb. It was an app that blinked various colours in order to get the attention of friends in various places.
You might be packed in tightly at some trendy wine bar, or maybe you’re waiting for your friend to come out of the mosh-pit at a Nickleback gig. There may even be the time that you save a seat for your friend in the cinema and when they finally walk in mid-previews carrying their popcorn, you need to let them (and everyone else around you) know where you are.
Of course, you could any number of methods to get their attention, but why not a blinking screen of colour? Thats where this dumb app comes into play.
Lookfor is that dumb application. Im not saying dumb in order to poke fun at the creators of this application, no, they refer to it as dumb themselves in their very polished ad/pitch/intro video.
At first I thought it was a bit of a joke, then I realised that we now live a world of Yo and other such single-serving apps. How popular is it? How popular will it be? Who knows.
After I watched the video I immediately thought :
“Huh, why didn’t they just do this as a web app?”
I know that there are advantages to doing it as a native app — AppStore presence … money …
But, I thought that there were better benefits to doing it as a WebApp.
You could support more than just 2 platforms. iOS and Android are not the only mobile platforms.
You can be accessed anywhere with a browser. You could use your laptop, netbook or ultrabook as a blinking beacon of attention if you wanted — hell, you could put a Chromebook to good use! If you had a device with a browser (any browser) you should be able to use this. If there is any support for the Web VS Native argument, this is it.
So I set about building it. A few lines of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and a metric fuckton of different icon sizes, Get Over Here was complete.
You can access the Get Over Here app via a URL (app.getoverhere.co.uk).
You can Add it to you Homescreen for quick access.
You can use it on any internet connected device that has a screen and a browser and It even works offline. (He says confidently without even really testing it a lot)
In sticking with the “simplicity is … something”, I decided that there was only 1 colour, rather than try to fleece you for some DLC colour packs. It’s also free, doesn’t want access to any of your data or camera and open sourced so you can download, configure, and host your own version if that’s something that tickles your fancy.
So go forth and find your friends.
