Nervy times - we (the developer and I) have almost finished my first iPhone app (and maybe my last . . .). It is to be called City Poems and relates the streets of central London to poems written about them. If you are in, say, Trafalgar Square you can see poems written about the statues, including King Charles 1 on his horse, or about Whitehall and St James Park etc and see how far away they are from where you are standing (thanks to GPS).
It has been quite a revelation for me because these poems - all out of copyright - tell you more about life in London than any history book from graphic descriptions of executions at Newgate prison to advice on how to avoid the red light districts of London (rather difficult as they seem to have been everywhere). There's a long seventeenth century poem entirely about a pub crawl from one end of the city to another.
It has been a huge but rewarding slog for me finding the poems and entering all the longitude and latitude points which sometimes acquire a life of their own, A small section can be seen above. I still can't quite understand why some ended up on the west coast of Africa or why Bow Street keeps migrating to Bishopsgate. But it is almost there. Coder Keef has ironed out most of the bottlenecks and it has gone through Apple's Mac store. If I can only get the remaining geo tags into order then that will be it. Apart, of course, from the 64,000 dollar question - how to publicise it.
(To be continued . . .)
