How do Balloons travel?
Balloons! uses your iPhone's location services to work out where you are launching your balloon from. The black box then works out speed and direction of travel. If another Balloons! user tries to catch a balloon and yours is one that is in range then yours has a chance of being the one that they catch.
But how does the black box take notice of winds, the earth's rotation, etc etc? That would be telling....
My Balloon has been reported - what does that mean?
As your balloon drifts around the world people will be adding their own tags to yours. Hopefully they'll be interesting, funny, whimsical etc. However sometimes the tag might be in bad taste or have the possibility of offending someone. In this case a user who catches the balloon can report it. This immediately causes the balloon to be pulled from the sky and will appear in your balloon tracker as being 'reported'. You can also report your own balloon if someone has added a tag which is in poor taste.
Here at Shiny we then take a look at the balloon. At our discretion we'll remove any offensive tag(s), and put the balloon back in the sky again. Note : our word is final and we'll tend to err on the side of caution so you have been warned! :)
My Balloon is saying POPPED - what does that mean?
No balloon lasts for ever and when their day comes they Pop. They pop at random so some will only last a short time whilst others will have more fulfilling journeys - it's all just the luck of the draw.
If all your balloons have popped why not launch some more?
Why can't I use pictures from my iPhone Camera Roll?
This was a major design question when we were creating Balloons! In the end we decided against using the camera roll as we wanted to maintain the spontaneity of the app and keep it in the 'Here and Now'. We also had some concerns that inappropriate photos and spam would be easier to send out if the content could be created elsewhere and then attached to a balloon.
Dave wrote a blog post about moderation of reported balloons and also some more detail about why we do not allow people to attach pictures from their camera library which some of you might find interesting.
http://blog.daveverwer.com/iphone-development/the-moderation-problem/
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