I wrote this post for the Map Your Show blog this week.

With a vaccine out in the wild, it’s just a matter of time before we see more in-person events. The hope is real, and we’re excited that interest in our onsite mobile app is returning. I’d like to share a few things that I think will become the new normal in the event mobile apps this year.

COVID-19 Plans

When large events return, it’s a certainty there will be requirements and restrictions on the federal, state, county, municipal, building, and/or event level. We know how important it is to have a smooth registration and entry process. Mobile apps can help. Having clear guidelines for exhibitors and attendees about masks, vaccinations, exposure will be extremely important. Daily symptom/exposure in-app surveys could allow an express lane for entry. Whatever the process is for your show, don’t forget about your app!

Contactless

I miss handshakes as much as anyone. But there is more and more discussion going on about contactless functionality to keep us safe. Adoption of QR codes will increase. Attendees could collect and favorite products by scanning codes. Exhibitors might offer virtual business cards this way. Self-service, contactless check in processes, tracking education credits, even basic contact tracing are all possibilities here. And mobile offers a clear solution.

Location

If you’ve cancelled or postponed an event in the past year, you’ve at least considered going virtual. Some amazing solutions have been deployed to help people demo, host meetings, and communicate new ideas from afar. But what happens when shows return? How do you juggle virtual and in-person? In-person attendees have much different needs. People in the building need to know where an exhibitor’s booth is. Virtual attendees need product videos and chat instead. Because of this new segmentation, you might offer your in-person attendees special content, information, and functionality, all enabled by detecting location in the mobile app.

Engagement

Our mobile app has always been focused on the on-site experience. When events do return, attendees will have high expectations to justify the new risks and difficulties. More than ever, people who are at your show deserve an amazing discovery process. Creating engaging features and content will be critical to success. We’ll see more individualizations in notifications and recommendations. We’ll see event apps take pages out of success stories like Clubhouse and TikTok. There is plenty to explore here, and I’m really excited to dig in.

I hope you enjoyed my post, if you ever want to discuss or brainstorm your mobile app needs, please reach out!

Thank you Adobe Flash.

I’ll always remember you fondly as the internet’s coming of age. You made online a more beautiful, fun place. You made development more accessible than ever. You helped Map Your Show get started. You empowered my career.

Cheers!

If you didn’t know, pretty much any website or mobile app has, is, or will use Google Analytics to track their users. Until today, I did too. But I’ve decided to stop using it on sullivan.io.

The Good

Let me explain what I get from Google Analytics. It tells me incredible things. How my users found the website (direct, social media, search etc). How much time someone spends on a page. What pages they view. What country they’re from. What browser they use. Who their internet provider is. Whether they’re returning or new.

It’s all fantastic information. I understand more about users, what topics are popular. It helps me deliver the most valuable content. This is why so many admins use it. Pure insight, nothing malicious.

You might feel fine about a website getting this info from you. And I agree with you. Giving a website owner some insights will likely result in a better experience.

The Bad

So why stop using it?

Google Analytics funnels all this information to one central place: Google. They have all the info across all sites that use Google Analytics. It’s like having a stranger peaking over your shoulder any time you hit a website or use an app. They know exactly what you did on (virtually) every site you visit. And they write it down in a database, stored forever. And that is horrifying.

Protect Yourself

Browser Extensions

To protect my privacy, I use a couple browser extension that block tracker scripts. These extensions prevent other trackers too (Facebook, ad networks, malware). If privacy is your thing, I implore you to use these extensions.

• uBlock Origin
• Ghostery

Use an iPhone

Apple is the only option for a privacy oriented person. While the ad-based, information tracking model of the internet works for Google, Apple is offering an alternative: paying a premium for privacy. Using an iPhone won’t solve all your problems, but it gives you real options to block trackers in the browser. iOS limits software providers from fingerprinting your device. And this will only get better as time goes on.

Pi-hole

Something I’d love to try at home is a Pi-hole. The Pi-hole is a physical device that you install on your home network. It blocks these trackers and ads before they even get to your device. When someone is on your wifi, they are protected. It’s takes some technical know-how, but an interesting solution.

Protect your Users

For website administrators out there, dropping Google Analytics is a scary proposition. It’s so easy to setup on your site and the insights are valuable. But there are promising alternatives.

You always have the option to log the data yourself. There are technical issues sure, but it also forces you to ask the question: What user data do I care about? Instead of logging everything through Google Analytics, focus on what is most important, ask the right questions, dive deep. This is best practice for anyone delivering product to the world.

If you don’t feel like rolling out a logging/database solution of your own, there are some quick wins from privacy oriented analytics companies. Here are a couple I like:

• Cloudflare: A great service to optimize your website, they offer some very basic analytics by default.
• Simple Analytics: It’s not free, but that’s because they don’t sell your user data to ad networks!

There’s still a lot I can do to protect myself and users of this site. But this is a start. Thanks for reading!

Drug testing is an idea that doesn’t live up to the hype. Maybe it sounds good on paper, but I think the unintended consquences of broad drug testing negate any positive effects that come out of it. Since we’re about to have a baby, I’m going to focus on that.

Like many places in the country, Cincinnati is experiencing the heroin epidemic. Last year, the Cincinnati Enquirer won a Pulitzer prize for Seven Days of Heroin, which I highly recommend. It’s more present and visible than ever, and I’ve personally seen and heard shocking, depressing things close to home.

A few years ago, in response to the spike in opiate use, Cincinnati hospitals began universal testing on mothers and newborns. Mothers are welcome to opt out of the test, but if they do, the baby will be tested. If mother or baby fails, the child is kept for observation.

Here’s the thing. You can absolutely test positive for opiates by eating poppy seeds. Bagels, muffins, chips, salad dressing. Federal prisons banned poppy seeds in the 80’s so they could keep having reliable tests. It’s been a joke for so long there was an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine failed for eating a muffin.

There are plenty of instances of this happening to women and their newborns. One story took place at a hospital 5 minutes away from us. Mother had a false positive due to a bag of bagel chips. They didn’t let her take the baby home and required her to be supervised when with her child for 2 months at threat of taking her child away.

Can you imagine not being able to take your newborn baby home because of something you know to be false? Can you imagine not being able to be alone with your child? It’s devastating.

When the stakes are this high, how can we rely on something so faulty?

I understand as a community we’re sometimes in a situation that requires drastic action. But until testing becomes more reliable and less damaging to innocent people, I say throw it out the window.

As a map guy I’ve been keeping my own personal surf spot map for several years now. So why not share it?

It includes all the spots that I’ve surfed myself on various trips/stints: The Space Coast (FL), Oahu, Bali, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Cabo, California, and the Outer Banks.

Check it out!

Technical Notes

To create and style the background map, I used Mapbox Studio and tweaked the theme North Star. Mapbox has a ton of awesome themes to start from that look incredible.

I had the location data in Google Earth originally, ported over to Google MyMaps a few years ago. MyMaps has an export KML option built in. I converted the KML to GeoJSON using ogr2ogr.

With the background map and location points figured out, it was a matter of creating a basic javascript map using Mapbox GL. That’s it!

Been thinking a lot about upgrading my 2 year old phone after seeing how awesome the iPhone XS cameras are. But after tinkering around with my iPhone 7, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I’m not using my iPhone camera to it’s fullest potential. With these new settings it might be enough to hold me off another year!

Better, Smoother Videos

I almost always prefer taking videos over photos. Sure they’re a little more difficult to consume and share, but they’re also more lively, genuine, fun to watch. Finn loves watching vids of himself!

I recently found out that the default video setting on my phone is 1080p HD at 30 fps (frames per second). That’s sounds good at first, but there are two higher quality settings available to me.

Go to Settings -> Camera -> Record Video to see the options.

1080p HD at 60 fps offers the same resolution with double fps. Higher frame rates are something you see in action packed video games. But when you turn on this setting, the motion in the video looks buttery smooth. It’s the one I’m using.

4K at 30 fps. I had no idea you could shoot 4K video on an iPhone. You won’t be able to notice this high of a resolution on an older iPhone like mine, but 4K TV’s and monitors are more common now, so why not? Here one reason not to: your videos will take up 3-4x more space on your phone. So watch out!

Edit Live Photos

Live Photos have been a thing on iOS for awhile now, and I’m a fan. If you’ve never heard of this feature, it basically takes a little video every time you take a photo. When you look at your photo it just looks still, but if you press and hold, it plays the video. It adds a little life to the experience.

What I didn’t know was that you can use a different frame from the video as your photo. So if you have a blurry or mistimed photo, you might be able to edit it to the right moment and save the day.

Here’s mis-timed picture of Finn at daycare.

But a Live Photo actually records a mini video.

On my phone I can hit edit and select the frame I want, and I found a couple options I like better.

Obvious improvements!

There are a ton of websites that give iPhone photography tips. Shoot me a message if you have any more!

At the beginning of 2017, I set a bunch of goals for myself. I was doing OK halfway through the year, and with just a few days left until 2018, it’s time to see how I did.

Minimalize (now)

COMPLETE

Like I said in my last goals update, this one is done. That said, this one has gotten harder with Finn around. Especially after Christmas. So it’s something I’ll need to remain conscious of, not just for me, but for Finn as well.

I think this will likely become an annual thing for me, and what better time than right after Christmas?

Start a Business (soon)

COMPLETE

Big news: I’m scheduled to close on a duplex in about 1 week from today! While this technically isn’t happening in 2017, I’m marking it as complete. Because even though I don’t own it, I’ve been trying to operate as a small business. Tracking expenses, responding to bank/realtor emails, thinking about taxes, etc. That’s a business right?

I spent more time on this goal than any other. I’ve looked at tons of real estate, crunched the numbers, seen several, made offers. Besides real estate, I also seriously considered becoming a franchisee (I hope to write more about that experience later on). I’ve had countless phone calls with investment partners and advisors.

Long story short: It’s hard to open a business that doesn’t require me to quit my day job. So I’m really happy to end the year with some tangible results here (hopefully)!

Routine Reading (once a month)

COMPLETE

I was off to a bit of a slow start, but at the end, I read or listened to 15 books. OK so one of those is a child’s that I read to Finn. But I read it probably 20 times so I’m counting it.

Here’s the chronological list: *- Zillow Talk

• Dad Is Fat
• Good Dog, Happy Baby
• Hold
• Marley and Me
• David and Goliath
• Kid Sheriff and the Terrible Toads
• The Richest Man in Babylon
• Food: A Love Story
• The Art of War
• Good to Great
• Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
• The Undercover Economist
• Mr. Mercedes
• Evicted*

I think the last book I read, Evicted, was my favorite of the year. A Pulitzer prize winner, it’s the story about the private rental market in Milwaukee. There were some shocking statistics, infuriating decisions, and enough to ponder for days. I found it on Bill Gates annual reading list, and I’m so glad I read it.

Take Better Photos (once a week)

FAILED

I signed up for the Dogwood52 Challenge, and I’ve failed miserably. I took 12/52 photos, or 23%.

The funny thing is I’ve probably taken more photos this year than any previous. So am I better at taking photos? Maybe, but only of Finn.

Walk Oliver (once a day)

FAILED

Once it got cold, I stopped walking Oliver everyday. At 20 degrees, it’s too difficult to bring Finn along. Ollie’s best chance is around 7 or 8 pm, when Lauren is putting Finn down for the night. But it’s also usually my first chance to have some me time, which usually involves sitting. No excuses, I blew it for the past several months. Ollie is lucky to get a walk once a week… Sorry doggy.

Conclusion

3/5 goals ain’t bad. I feel pretty good, but I’m not going to dwell on it. I really just wanted to clear my plate and formulate my 2018, coming soon!