It's all about Yandda! (an Android app)

It was in February this year that i sent this mail to a friend of mine:

 

from Buls Yusuf 
to
date Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 2:22 PM
subject Woz 'ere
mailed-by gmail.com

It just came to me. I remember in secondary school then, when you go into classrooms you'll find signatures of people/students that were there before. You'll find things like "Buls was ere, 95". That kind of thing.

Now imagine us writing an Android app that let's people give details of places they are at and that info be made available to anyone having the app to see a list of all those who have been at that location before. It's going to be fully location based.

An example, I go to kilmanjaro on the 10th of Jan and I use the app to save my signature (a phrase, my name, time date etc) using my gps enabled device. You come to kilmanjaro on the 14th of Feb and using the app you view a list of all peoples' signatures that have been at that very location (you should be able to view by name, date, keyword/phrase etc)

The thought just came to me like 10mins ago. What do you think about it?

Buls

Now, i didn't really work on that idea till later in May or so when Google launched the Android Developer Challenge for Sub-Sahara Africa. I had played around with the Android SDK months earlier so i didn't hesitate to rise to the developer challenge.

After months of hacking on code and making it up to the final round of ADC, Yandda! came into existence or partial existence if i may say, since i still have a lot of features i would like to add to it. ;-)

Well, it's currently in the Android Market and below is a description of Yandda! (please try it out)

 

If you've ever wished that people know that you had visited a particular place in the past or that you were simply there before them, then Yandda! is just the app for that!

Yandda! lets you engrave a signature and tie it to a location (buildings, parks, landmarks etc) for future visitors to discover. It lets other users of Yandda! know that you were once at a particular location. Its similar to how people engrave their initials on walls just so that others can see them. You can engrave and share signatures publicly, with a certain clique of friends or even privately (just visible to you only and no one else).

The Cliques feature of Yandda! lets you group your friends so you can choose which clique of friends to share your signatures with when you engrave them. Depending on your activity on Yandda! you can earn trophies that give you special capabilities. Currently there are 3 trophies that can be earned (more trophies shall be added in the future).

You can create a game made up of your publicly visible signatures for other users to conquer. Anyone playing a game must visit and discover signatures in the actual location they were engraved in order to conquer them. You complete a game by conquering all signatures that make it up. A lot of new features shall be added to games in the future. Please note that when you create a game, it is geo-tagged. This means that when anyone intends to register and play a game they will be presented with games that were created within their current location.

You can also choose what your profile visitors get to see with regards to your public signatures, friends and trophies.

Please send feature requests and suggestions to yanddawachi.abp@gmail.com. Yandda! is in its infancy and new features shall be constantly added so please be a part of it!

Yandda! is available in the android market here. Hope you like it!

Views: 141

Comment

You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!

Join Codetown

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Presentation: Accelerating LLM-Driven Developer Productivity at Zoox

Amit Navindgi discusses the systematic shift at Zoox from fragmented documentation to an AI-driven ecosystem. He explains how they built "Cortex," a secure platform integrating RAG, multi-modal LLMs, and contributor-friendly agent APIs. He shares practical strategies for driving adoption through AI champions and hackathons, emphasizing the move from deterministic workflows to autonomous agents.

By Amit Navindgi

Moonrepo Releases Moon v2.0 with WASM Plugin Toolchains and Overhauled CLI

Moonrepo has released moon v2.0, its first major update since v1, featuring a plugin-based toolchain system and support for multiple configuration formats including JSON and TOML. The CLI has been restructured, enhancing task inheritance and Docker integration. Notable changes include a shift in architecture and improvements to VCS support.

By Daniel Curtis

Scaling Social Systems in Software Organizations

Fast-scaling teams must rebuild trust and psychological safety as their social systems expand. Intentional, redundant communication across multiple formats can keep everyone aligned. Cross-team rituals, buddy systems, and rotating facilitators can reduce silos by building bridges between teams. Leaders accelerate this by modeling the vulnerability they want to see.

By Ben Linders

Pinterest Engineers Eliminate CPU Zombies to Resolve Production Bottlenecks

Pinterest identified and resolved CPU starvation issues that affected machine learning training jobs on its Kubernetes-based platform, PinCompute. The engineers traced the problem to an unused Amazon ECS agent, which caused memory cgroup leaks. By disabling the agent, they stabilised performance. This case illustrates the importance of understanding system defaults for effective troubleshooting.

By Mark Silvester

Anthropic Traces Six Weeks of Claude Code Quality Complaints to Three Overlapping Product Changes

Anthropic published a postmortem tracing six weeks of Claude Code quality complaints to three overlapping product-layer changes: a reasoning effort downgrade, a caching bug that progressively erased the model's own thinking, and a system prompt verbosity limit that caused a 3% quality drop. The API and model weights were unaffected. All issues were resolved April 20.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service