Ulsan Places to Eat and Drink
Have you ever been out and around town and wonder where you want to eat or drink? Forgotten all the choices there are? While it may be possible to find a PC and surf over to UlsanOnline.com and check out the restaurant or nightlife section, it’s not usually convenient once you’re away from your computer. And even if you have a smart-phone capable of reading webpages, that’s not the most efficient way to find something.
But now there IS something that is easy, convenient and efficient – Ulsan Life. A completely new smart-phone app for Android phones (sorry, iPhone users) that let’s you see at a glance what restaurants or bars are in Ulsan that other foreigners have found to be worthy of your time and wallet. And even better, you can see what’s nearby and read a review of the place. Ulsan Life is a smart phone app that uses both Google maps and UlsanOnline.com to give you the big picture of places to eat and drink in Ulsan. The map will show your present location with yellow and red pins where the foreigner bars and restaurants are located. Tap a pin on the map and see the name. Tap it again and read a review on UlsanOnline to see if it’s worthy of your hard earned coin. Tap the map to zoom or pan to see other areas and places to eat or drink.
The application scans and parses a file from Ulsanonline that contains the latitude and longitude of all the bars and restaurants we’ve reviewed and places pins on the map according to their location and category. Any new places we review will be automatically included each time you run Ulsan Life. Quite a few places are not yet in the database (Wa Bar, for example, has so many locations I haven’t added) but will be added soon.
Currently, the app considers just restaurants and bars, although cultural places of interest might be included later in a future update.
The lat/long values for the bars and restaurants are rough approximations based on Google Earth and Google Maps. Please let us know if you find something that isn’t where it should be.
To be perfectly honest, the app is fairly simplistic. It’s not rocket science, although I am proud to be able to have combined a number of technologies to make this a reality. It uses basic web functionality of HTML, PHP mobile web specifics, XML along with the smart phone pieces of Java, Android, SAX and GoogleMaps.
If anyone has a Mac lying around they’d like to donate, I’ll port this app and the previous app I completed last week, Teacher’s Pet. to iPhones. I might even give you Teacher’s Pet for free if you give me a Mac.
As usual, I’d love to hear your feedback on the smart phone apps that we’ve already added as well as any ideas you have for future apps.