Massive Update to Harpoen Makes the App More Useful

Harpoen today released a huge update on the App Store. The app that encourages you to leave your mark wherever you go has become more social and more useful with version 1.1.0. Some of the most popular feature requests had been a way to see all your harps and the comments that people have left on them. The latest update incorporates both and more.

Eschewing the traditional tabbed interface or the more recent sidebar introduced by the Dolphin browser and popularized by Facebook and Path, Harpoen chose to repurpose the icon once meant for its settings menu for something more. Tapping the ellipsis icon on the top of the screen now brings up a more comprehensive menu containing several options including the old settings menu.

The biggest change in this update is the ability to see harps in various lists. The Trail view houses two lists, one is Interaction, which lists all the harps you've left in various locations and the comments that people have left on them and the other is Read, which includes the harps you've read and commented on, and apparently includes your own as well, because obviously, you've read them yourself.

Tapping the summary of nearby harps at the bottom of the radar view takes you to a list view of those nearby harps for much easier but arguably less interesting way to discover them. On the standard radar view, the circles that represent the harps are larger when they have more comments.

When someone leaves a comment on your harp and the app is not active, you'll hear the sound of an angklung as its audio notification in addition to the standard notification badge icon. A uniquely Indonesian sound to signify the origin on the app. Unfortunately the comments cannot be removed if they happen to be unwanted for whatever reason. Perhaps there should be a way to disable comments or flag them as inappropriate? After all, user generated content can vary wildly. Granular controls with regards to anonymous commenters would also be worth considering.

With notification for comments, Harpoen just raised the social factor of the app and in a way encourages its users to post more interesting harps, be it text, image, or links. Additionally, the fact that you can go back to the harps that you've read without having to be near its actual location helps their visibility.

Another significant new feature is the ability to find out the directions to reach a harp. This might have been a response to my comment regarding playing scavenger hunt with the app but again, there's a privacy issue here which needs to be addressed and people need to be able to determine whether their harps can be tracked. In other words, perhaps some people might want to keep a personal collection of harps, one that only they can see and not others.

Talking to J.P. Ellis, co-founder of Harpoen, last week, he said that they are shifting from the digital graffiti mindset that they originally began with as it might alienate those who are unfamiliar with the concept or simply averse to the idea of graffiti itself. On the other hand, he said, leaving marks had been a basic trait of people all the way back to the cavemen era.

People from previous eras told their stories through images and carvings on stones and rocks and they also left marks on certain locations to inform future visitors of what to expect at that location. This is actually closer to what Harpoen intended with the mobile app and the reason why it is broadening the description of the service. Leaving marks or harps is a way to communicate to the future.

A slew of further updates were planned to be included which would have delayed the release of this update but when it comes to iterating releases, one has to consider milestones and the updates in this version probably actually qualify the app to be considered a 1.5. A more significant update could push it into 2.0 territory, but given that this is still version 1, it's a great release to solidify the initial offering.

A couple of final observations about this release. The Settings selection is the only menu entry that does not have its own icon. Home, Trail, and Around Me all have one. The app is also partially bilingual. While most of the app is in English, descriptions for Invite, Rate, Tour, and Contact are in Indonesian. It's one thing to try and highlight the origin of an app but having mixed languages in one instance would only serve to confuse users. At the moment it's probably still very much understandable since the majority of Harpoen users are in Indonesia but for the next major release I expect the app to be properly localized with options to run the app in either English or Indonesian.

Harpoen 1.1.0 is available for free on the App Store and you can also check out more screenshots on our Tumblr.