Beacon

Today, Soroush Khanlou and I are launching a new app named Beacon, that we’re hoping everyone in San Jose for WWDC will find invaluable. Beacon allows you to signal availability to your friends, people you follow on Twitter that also follow you back. We wanted to create a place for ad-hoc events to flourish. A space where anyone could say they're free now, headed to a session, or getting lunch – and make these events available for their friends to join. We also wanted to encourage extending beyond friend groups, so Beacon allows for creating and viewing public events in your area. Five weeks ago we decided to work on this idea, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we accomplished in such a short amount of time. Of course the app is written in Swift – Swift 3 to be exact – but the server is written in Swift too!

Beacon is an idea that's been in my head for a while, positioned to be specific for WWDC. We're treating this as an experiment to see if people find it as useful as we hope.

I want to thank everyone who beta tested the app with us and our partners for bearing with us while we spent long nights and weekends getting our app out the door. Special thanks to Linda Dong for her generous design contribution, and help positioning Beacon as a colorful and exciting place to connect with friends in the real world.