an app for a Cafe - what's possible?

[DaveC]

hey guys, so a friend of a friend wants an app made for his cafe/coffee shop.. I have no idea what he wants yet, but I'll be speaking to him tomorrow afternoon to hear his ideas/to see if I can help him. I'm just wondering.. since I've only ever been into making games, what kind of app features can I offer?

1) how hard would it be to create a system where he can display special deals/news updates through the app?
2) would it be possible to create a 'loyalty card' style system with the app? like.. buy 10 coffees get the 11th free?
3) could I do a gps find the store system?

I'm guessing I'd need to create a website with a control panel for him, where he can upload messages to be displayed in the app.. so would I use the get object and some php perhaps?

anyone have any ideas for features? cheers!

[Jacob]

Your best bet would be some RSS to display the news posts. You can make barcodes that are scannable on phones, so that could work for the cards. I believe there is functionality to access the GPS in the phone, so between that and Google Maps you should be able to get it to work.

[DaveC]

cool.. can you elaborate on the RSS and do you know if it's possible for MMF to scan barcodes..? I'm not sure how phones even scan them.. is it through the camera?

[Anders]

You can use the Get object to get a list of news and other data you can display.
GPS coordinates can easily be used to find the nearest coffee shop. You simply store a list of GPS coordinates of the coffee shops in your app, then loop over them comparing the distance to the current GPS position and show the one with the shortest distance.

The loyalty card thing might be harder to do in a secure way to prevent cheat. iOS no longer allows apps to retrieve the unique device identifier which otherwise could have been used for such a task.

[StingRay]

Hi! Is it possible to show that in reference to google maps inside the app?! or do we need an extra extension for this?!
(I wanna show different points of interest on a map and the location of the user on a trail)

could we do this manually?! i cant think of a solution that moment...

EDIT:
btw, how i could get the distance out of it - is there a formula for that?! thx!

[DistantJ]

I'd think you could show the google map with the webview extension

[StingRay]

Yes, sure. But i Want to interact with the Map (if the User clicks on a Point of interest the app should Show some content - this isnt possible with the webview.

[DaveC]

cheers for the replies.. I'll tell him I'm not interested in doing a coupon thing if he wants that.. but maybe he'll just want a menu/live deals/map etc.