@rrhoover It reinforced the importance of making the walks location-aware. We guide people along a path, but people go at their own pace; they'll stop to explore, take pictures, get food, or just walk at their own pace. The walks are all scored with music and sound design. If we wanted one music cue to last as you walk across a couple of blocks - with street crossings and turns along the way, we had to just manually time it perfectly using an assumed walking speed, or else it would destroy the continuity of the music. We ended up building a new engine that actual mixes the audio tracks in the app in real time, like in a video game. So you can have music cues playing independently of narration, allowing us to create location triggers at every single place where you need location synced to audio. Sorry if that doesn't make sense. Also sorry if it does make sense but is extraordinarily boring. But that's what we were working on. TLDR it allows us to make walks that are much more forgiving and adaptable. Also the first version of sync we built was based on multipeer and that ended up being super buggy so we rewrote it from the ground up (with an eye toward Android compatibility).

@rrhoover @andrewmason I was an early user on the beta. I really enjoyed the way it felt like a "This American Life" episode that you got to walk through in real time. You can feel that influence Andrew mentions in @abexlumberg's Startup Podcast. The content is really unique in a way that is difficult to express to someone who hasn't done it. That's exciting and I think they did a great job. I was surprised by a few things (below). I though a lot about the immersive experience & tech issues Andrew mentions here at first. But what surprised me was how little that mattered, without more fundamental things like stability, certainty, and enabling self-expression solidly in place. * The visual guides were really helpful. Audio could get me to 90% confidence, but the images brought me over the hump to feeling comfortable. They even set images to work on the iOS lock screen, which I thought was a great touch. * I told Andrew this last month: I wish there were shorter Detours I could fit into my life more easily (eg a lunch break). Right now they're a good length for a date, which meant - even though I really wanted to test it out! - I had to wait until my girlfriend and I could set aside an hour or two. I couldn't act while I was excited about it. * If I paused it long enough, or I got a call, or I took a video, the Detour would stop, and I couldn't pick up where I left off. We'd have to backtrack to the nearest checkpoint and start a segment over. * I couldn't document my (super fun!) experience at Musee Mechanique because while I needed video to capture the experience, it would trigger the bug above. When I was thinking "walking tour app" I wouldn't have thought enabling self-expression would be so important. * As Andrew said, pairing was error prone. My g/f's phone didn't support iOS8, so we spent hours unsuccessfully upgrading her phone, then successfully upgrading my old iphone5, eventually giving up and sharing one pair of ear buds. I really hope the team supports iOS7 soon because I want to take my family on Detours next time they visit. And while iOS upgrade stats are great, this product is unique in that even if it's just my grandma that can't use it, the whole group is less likely to do it.

@staringispolite thanks for sharing this. And thanks @rrhoover - all I could think as I read this was what a special community you've got going here. These comments are all so great and useful. Don't fuck it up! :-) Shorter Detours - yes yes yes. We're working on it. All those other bugs should be fixed.

@rrhoover @andrewmason Good to hear the other bugs are fixed! Stoked to check out the non-beta version now. The App Store still says iOS8 is required, which will probably mean I can't use it with my family (a couple iPhone4's, which can't upgrade). I understand it sometimes adds development complexity, but unless there's iOS8-only features it depends on, it'd be great to see iOS7 support. Not to mention, Apple says 28% of iOS devices are iOS7 or earlier, so it seems like a mass-market product like this could really benefit https://developer.apple.com/supp...

@adcooley thanks for your help Austin and so glad you had a chance to meet Duke!

@dbl yes, absolutely. I think people will be blown away when they get their hands on the app we're building to make these tours, there's some really cool technology involved that you haven't seen before. Ultimately, we're just creating Detours ourselves to set the bar and dog food the creation tool. The same reason Epic makes Unreal instead of just Unreal Engine. (I have no idea if that's true, but there is no harm in pretending like it is) We'll have something to release this year.

@dbl @andrewmason That is actually true re: Epic and Unreal. They were the team that could push the engine tech the most, at least initially.

@dbl @andrewmason this is going to be amazing. thought of this while i was on my honeymoon in spain middle of last year

@andrewmason small issue but still important. I forgot my password but the mobile page doesn't have a link to retrieve or reset it.

@andrewwarner sorry Andrew - we only have password reset in the app right now! :-| I was trying to create a good example of MVP... yeah, that's the reason. If you download the app, you can reset your password from there.

@andrewwarner @andrewmason Possibly related? I went to the "Redeem" link above, signed in to my existing account, and it forwarded me to https://me.detour.com/undefined (which error'ed)

@andrewmason I've been looking forward to this since the episode of of Startup Podcast where it was mentioned.

@marksbren it was super helpful, and thanks for chiming in here Mark, this makes my day!

@404notkim yeah I've thought about doing that, but then I think, if the CEO of a company did that to me, I'd just be like, "hey - would you please leave? You're making me uncomfortable." So know that I am there in spirit with you on every Detour, and the only thing keeping me from being there in reality is an overwhelming fear of rejection.