Arrivals for Foursquare is an app based on a concept developed by Toby Barnes for his eight-year-old son to keep track of him while on business trips. Originally called “Where’s Dad?”, the web-based program was made to display Barnes’ current locations based on check-ins.
The updates were shown directly on the screen of a spare iPhone he gave his son and were designed to look like an arrivals board from an airport.
Similarly, Arrivals features an at-a-glance display, so anyone can view Foursquare check-ins of friends on a split-flap screen inspired by old-time airport arrivals boards, complete with sound effects of changing split flaps. The Arrivals app conveys where your friends are without a time stamp, city, country or the names of friends. It simply displays the name of the venue in which the person checked-in and their Foursquare profile picture.
“My son often asks where I am when I am out of the country for business,” Barnes, a digital products designer and strategist based in Nottingham, U.K., told Mashable. “We didn’t want to give him access to a Twitter or his own computer.”
He loaded the program onto an old iPhone that would sat in a glass box on his son’s wall, connected to the house’s Wi-Fi network, so that updates would be automatic.
“He hears a click-clack and will know I checked in somewhere,” said Barnes, who will often check-in at airports or train stations upon arrival. “As we were developing it, we started to think it would be useful to see where friends are. If you see friends have checked into a pub around the corner, you could go and meet them.”
People can use their old devices in this way by connecting the Arrivals website to Foursquare and running it as a native application. Since it’s web-based, anyone can access Arrivals on their Kindle, iPad or any mobile device.
Arrivals was an attempt to truly display where friends are with a more clear and non-intrusive display, said Dan Williams, the web app’s developer. Williams uses Foursquare to solely check-in, but gets updates about the location of friends on Instagram and Twitter, rather than Foursquare itself.
“The idea is that if it sits passively on my desk, always visible, I can keep up with what’s happening,” he said. “The intention is to be calm, unobtrusive and pretty. It’s not much different to a screensaver or an executive desk toy.”
As to why Barnes went with an split-flab display, he says: “I have always been in love with the physical haptic change of a split-flap display. You can do a lot with it. It is something that is very subtle and really can aesthetically sit in the background and change.”
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