Saturday, August 4, 2012

Glympse; a very revealing app

You won't be lost if you have a Glympse. I just came across this app a few minutes ago and I already love it. It is simple and it works without any complicated setups. This is what it does. As soon as it is installed, you can view your own location on a Google map. Next, click "Send Glympse", and you will be able to send a link to this map to anyone's email or smartphone. The receiver will be able to view your location continuously on a PC or on a smartphone. You will need to set an expiry time for viewing your location; anything up to 4 hours. It works even when your phone is in sleep mode. The other person can still see where you are.

This application is very useful if you are going to a place where there is a tendency to get lost in the crowd, such as a market or a fun fair. It can be used to let your loved ones keep track of your movements when you are traveling somewhere. For example, if I am driving to Adelaide my family can see where I am at any one time. I only wish that the Glympse creator had thought of providing a more flexible expiry period. For instance, if I am away from home for several days, I wouldn't want to keep sending out a Glympse message every 4 hours. And for anyone with the Alzheimer's disease, someone will always be able to find out where the patient has wandered to.

3 comments:

Brian Lewis said...

Yes! The 4-hour expiry, with no way to renew the previous "Glympse" (using the same code already given to friends or family) is probably the only shortcoming with this extremely useful (and frequently-used) app.

Anonymous said...

You can extend the Glympse, but you have to do it before it expires. There is an ongoing request, almost since Glympse first came out to make the time longer. Even if they just added an option to not expire until destination reached would be great.

Anonymous said...

Hey guys, Glympse here. We continue to look at options for extending the maximum time for a Glympse beyond 4 hrs. The main issue for the limit is power consumption when using GPS. We're experimenting with some options now to see whether we can get the performance we need to build that feature right.

In the meantime, like Anonymous pointed out, there is a way to extend an actve Glympse. We also have an option to automatically "Expire on Arrival" as well, though. It's in the settings screen.

Thanks for using Glympse. We hope to have some cool new stuff for you guys soon.