The Night of Fireworks!

New Year’s Eve ushers in the start of yet another year. And many people welcome this with fireworks. We mean this quite literally. As you well know, millions of people welcome in the New Year by looking at spectacular fireworks display across many cities around the world. London is host to one of these fireworks displays.

Over 500,000 people are expected to be at viewing locations in London. 

Whatever your plans are, have a great time celebrating the start of 2015. With the end this post, we would like to wish you all a Happy New Year!!!

The Designer in the Programmer

As a programmer, you mostly spend a lot of time creating specific functions for a product. But at times, you have to create the interface as well. Although the function and the interface seem to go hand in hand, and they usually do, a separate set of skills and mind set is needed in creating them.

This post introduces the programmer to some graphic design aspects of interface building and useful resources that can be found on the web.

It is very likely that you’ll need some icons and images on your interface. You can get a designer to create specific images for you. Or you can browse through the many different online resources to buy the ones you need. Some of them include istockphoto, shutterstock, fotolia and gettyimages.

If paying for a designer or buying images is not an option, you can browse through some icons that are offered free by some websites including:

• Thenounproject
• Fatcow
• Webappers
• Freeimages

Most of these have a license agreement that usually states that you have to mention the source in your product. Be sure to read the license in details before using them.

And if you can’t find a unique image you’re after, and can’t pay for the services of a graphic designer, you can create your own (or attempt to). Photoshop is the most widely used graphic design program, but an open source alternative is Gimp.

Once you have all the required images and icons, then comes layout, navigation, consistency, structure and many others. Tips for a good interface design can be found on this Creative Bloq post.

Alphas and Betas

We're happy to announce the start of the Beta test phase of Livelynight! If you would like to get a first look into the app and provide any feedback, please send an email to admin@livelynight.co.uk. You'll then be invited to install and try the app.

Unfortunately, it is currently only available on iOS devices.

With the launch of our Beta testing, we have created a short post on Alpha and Beta tests and how this is used in software engineering.

If you're into movies, or come to think of it, any kind of media, and know little about software engineering, you would rightly guess that Alpha tests are superior to Beta tests. But in fact, they are both vital in the software engineering process.

After the painstaking tasks of analysing, designing and developing software comes the testing phase. This includes system testing, integration testing, alpha testing, then beta testing in that order. The next test type can only be started after the previous one has completed. After a successful Beta test, the product can then be launch.

• System Testing - Tests to ensure that each system functions correctly (independently)
• Integration Testing - Tests to ensure all systems function together
• Alpha Testing - Ensures that specific functions are working across the entire system
• Beta Testing - Conducted by external users to test in a real environment

If you're looking for more details on Alpha and Beta testing, check this page by Guru 99.

What's Your Name?

Today’s post shifts away from night outs and entertainment to a more business focused theme - finding a name for a company. 

There are numerous articles and blogs online that give different suggestions on how to go about this. Here are examples from Entrepreneur and Business Insider. (TL;DR - it's not a science, and experts have different opinions on the subject)

The name Livelynight did not come from a simple "AHA!" moment. But rather through a long and tiring process of eyeballing different words. You may get a sense of this process from the image provided.

Livelynight was eventually chosen because the two words described the main goals of what we plan to provide:

Lively 

• to describe an exciting time
• also to describe the use of live information

Night 

• well, it's a service providing ratings of bars

If you're in a similar position then perhaps this method can help. But remember that this is just another opinion. Even worse, it is not an expert opinion (as far as we know).

For the Dynamic Night Out

I have written about the nightlife scene in London in my previous posts. Although London is a great city for a good night out, we at Livelynight think we can make this experience better with our new service.

"What is Livelynight?" I hear you say. Well, in short, Livelynight seeks to enhance your nightlife by providing live ratings of pubs, bars and clubs. The live up to the minute ratings are provided by, and for, the Livelynight community.

You may have also noticed that there are many nights where the pub/bar chosen is not quite as it was hoped to be. Or a group of friends split up to form smaller groups because they each thought their destination was better. How would these separate groups inform each other? Maybe through instant messaging. But surely a better way must exist to make this all seamless.

This is how Livelynight started as a company. Take the two separate groups as an example. With a service like Livelynight that provides live ratings of bars, each group will be well informed of the atmosphere at the two places they are in. From there, they can each decide if they would like to stay or switch to a different place. 

Now expand these two groups and make it four. Four groups of friends at separate locations providing live ratings of where they are in. How about expanding to ten groups? How about a complete network of people going out in the city? Each person in the network knows how good any place in the city is, based on what other users are saying at a given time. Each user can now make more informed decisions on which place to visit, or even to stay home based on what other users are saying and if friends are going out.

This is the idea behind Livelynight - providing the atmosphere of places in order to have a truly dynamic and lively night out.

We hope you'll give this a try. You can follow Livelynight on Twitter or like Livelynight on Facebook in order to keep up to date with any progress until our final go live date.

Comfort of the Familiar or Excitement of the Unknown?

After mentioning how vibrant and alive the night life scene is in London on my previous post, I would like to touch on what I see as the two types of nights out – going to a familiar location or trying out uncharted territories.

Focusing on the first option, many people are happier at familiar places with familiar people doing familiar things. This removes almost all the uncertainties of a night out to ensure that every night is almost guaranteed to be a good one. It may lack a new atmosphere, but if you’re happy at where you are why change it? At pubs, bars and clubs, there are always the loyal customers who know the bartenders by name. This of course can come with some perks such as free drinks. This is truly not a bad option.

The alternative is to avoid reliving the same moment at the same location. You would miss out on perks that loyal customers may get, spend a lot of time exploring and have a few really bad nights. This sounds like the worse of the two right now. But trying out new places would mean different people, different atmosphere and different experiences. And seeing so many people wandering on the streets of Shoreditch or Soho, you can only imagine that there are many people who follow this doctrine.

You don’t have to be for one or the other. Most people sit somewhere in the scale. I am more geared toward exploring new places. Although the experience may vary from complete awful to surprisingly amazing, the unknown brings an excitement factor that is hard to replicate in familiar places. 

Where do you sit in this scale? 

Lively Nights

When you think of great night out cities, it’s hard to list 10 of them without having London in your thoughts. With a population of about 8 million, one of the highest in Europe, it isn’t a surprise to hear that London is as packed with people at night just as much as the day. A walk around Leceister Square at 11pm could have you convinced that more people come out at night than during the day. (No, it’s not because some are vampires).

So what do all these people do in London for a “night out”? Well, that’s difficult to answer. But with the variety of nightlife establishments, there is barely a thing that you can’t do. What I’ll like to focus on is the more traditional and oldest of night out experiences – the pint – as well as cocktails, wines and everything in between. Beer cocktails are on the rise in case you were wondering what in between would entail. These are mostly consumed in pubs, bars and clubs with people looking to socialize with friends and families, or even complete strangers. 

Now we come to numbers. Have you ever wondered how many people actually go out for a drink on any given night? Or how many pubs, bars and clubs are in London? To answer the second question, my guess was originally at about 5000, which I can say now, or rather hope, that it is not too far off. Beerintheevening.com lists the pubs as 4000 at the time of writing. I could not find much information on the number of clubs and bars. But I think we can agree that 500 is a good guess since undershooting is better than overstating, in my opinion. This trend will continue. 

There we have it, 4500 establishments where people can go to for a drink. Now assuming the supply should meet demand (that Economics class was for this!), and that each establishment has 2 new unique customers every hour from 6pm – 12am, then we can say, at the very least, given I have used very low figures, that 54000 people go out on a given night in London.

Although the figure could be way off the mark, I believe it gives a good idea on the numbers, which shows that London is truly a great city for a lively night out. 

I’ll continue on this theme on my next post. Write a comment if you have a better source or more accurate numbers, or if you have any thoughts on this at all.

First post, done!