for iPhone & iPad

A unique application that lets you send electrons to all* the countries in the world that have high level internet domain names. From your iOS device you can reach out and touch every country in the world with a few electrons, then see how long it takes them to respond. You'll never have to leave home, but you can touch them a 10 thousand kilometres away, and see a response.

V1.1 (Pending!)

Send electrons to twenty-five more countries.

We welcome a server in North Korea to the internet.

We remove the 500km double tap restriction for google map display.

We slow down the retry sequence and set the green/yellow state immediately at end of the ping cycle.

Do not sleep during the ping process.

Minor changes to the about text.

Adjusted touch sensitivity.

Dot Colours:

Green: We could visit, double tap to get a google map.

Red: Have internet, but the connectivity is so poor  we can't get an echo.

Black: Don't have an internet TLD, or they don't have internet connections.

Brown: They are uninhabited, or lack communication infrastructure. 

Grey: They have an internet TLD, but are uninhabited.

Pink: We can't find a internet connection.

Purple:  We have not visited them yet.

By reviewing network topology maps, internet infrastructure, and running diagnostics to determined which educational, telecommunications, or government sites are actually located in their respected countries you will find that  when you send electrons to Gibraltar they arrive in Gibraltar, not at a server in the United Kingdom, or at a cloud computing complex in the USA.

We start by sending electrons to countries starting on the Greenwich meridian and sweep westward at five hundred times the earth's natural rotation speed.

The pulsing dots are first purple in colour, they change to yellow as we make the contact attempt, then to either green, or some other status colour.   When you first use WorldPulse your network's local name server has to map the name of a server to a network address, sometimes this information is cached close to you. Other times that server has to ask a long chain of servers for the information, perhaps right into that country's  naming services. That can take many seconds, we won't wait too long, so don't be surprised if many countries aren't accessible on the first pass and turn red. The next pass has an easier time because that information will be cached near you for immediate reuse.

Once we have processed the entire planet we make five more attempts at one minute intervals to resolve failures. Because of your location, network issues, even the time of day, it's possible you might not be able to visit every country, but we'll try.

Touching:

Yes the globe spins, but you can tap once to make it stop,  use pinch, stretch, rotate or swipe to navigate.   Double tap and we'll bring up Google Maps so you can understand where you are, and we will place an  annotation pin on the map in the largest city or capital of the country to show the echo time in milliseconds. The speed of light is really fast, so don't be surprised if a country on the other side of the planet responds in an eye blink.

Sound:

At the start of each attempt we make a Ping noise, then maybe an echo sound, if the attempt fails then about 12 seconds later you'll get a thunk noise.  You can use the speaker icon to turn sound on, or off.  We'll remember the setting the next time you use WorldPulse.

Multi-tasking:

If you terminate WorldPulse then you'll need to wait ten minutes before you can perform the global sweep again.

Copyright Info:

The WorldPulse app is copyright Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd  2010, we are also the authors of Parcours.robo, WikiServer, and some Fractions calculators.  Idea and concept for WorldPulse by Ted Kaehler. If you like the app please do a review in the iTunes Store.

Notes:

*  We don't visit Antarctica, that's expensive for them since the electrons have to fly to a satellite, those electrons are free for you, but expensive for someone else. Small countries like Pitcairn Islands have opted out due to concerns about traffic costs. Lastly some remote islands have been assigned a network name, but are uninhabited, they exist in the internet, but don't actually have computers physically located on them, so there is no computer there to ping.

** WorldPulse generates a small amount of network traffic which might mean additional charges on your data plan.

*** WorldPulse is not a diagnostic tool, it's for entertainment, figuring out why a country is not reachable requires the use of professional tools that are specifically designed to perform network diagnostics, that's not WorldPulse's goal.