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: From Founding Engineer to CTO to CEO – At the Same Startup

Trisha Ballakur discusses her journey from a backend software engineer to CTO and CEO, using her startup Pointz as a case study. She explains how to implement bottom-up customer discovery to find product-market fit, effectively delegate to global contractors to reduce build times, customize open-source repos like Valhalla, and apply engineering test-case models to business development.

By Trisha Ballakur

Accountability is the Goal for AI, with EU Regulations Supporting Transparency

AI bias mirrors human bias; both stem from our language and lived experiences. Ethics and AI are inseparable, but AI changes affordances, making harmful actions easier to carry out. The EU regulations apply to AI, since digital products are products. The ultimate goal is accountability: companies must ensure transparency, and laws should favor using the simplest AI that gets the job done.

By Ben Linders

Microsoft Announces Azure Linux 4.0, Its First General-Purpose Server Linux Distribution

Microsoft announced Azure Linux 4.0 and Azure Container Linux at Open Source Summit. Azure Linux 4.0 is a Fedora-based general-purpose server distribution for Azure VMs, the first time Microsoft has offered a supported Linux beyond container hosting. Azure Container Linux is an immutable container-optimized host built on Flatcar.

By Steef-Jan Wiggers

Article: Stragglers, Not Failures: How Adaptive Hedged Requests Reduce p99 Latency by 74 Percent

n fan-out microservice architectures, slow-but-completing requests accumulate across services and drive p99 latency far higher than per-service metrics suggest. This article presents an adaptive hedging mechanism that uses DDSketch for real-time quantile estimation, windowed rotation to handle distribution drift, and a token-bucket budget to prevent load amplification.

By Prathamesh Bhope

Cloudflare Adds Support for Claude Managed Agents

Cloudflare recently added support for Claude Managed Agents, allowing developers to run and manage Claude agents within Cloudflare. Developers can connect agents to private systems, choose their runtime environment, and monitor agent activity using Cloudflare services.

By Renato Losio

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service