My City Pulse app: discover the rhythm of your city

With New Year around the corner, there will be a lot of events happening around you. If you are planning to celebrate the New Year, then, obviously, you need to find out where to bash. Luckily, we are living in a tech era; which means you can now discover the best events around you on your smartphone! All you need is My City Pulse app (or so they say). This app is available for free for Android and iOS (for now). Now, let's dig into what the app has to offer.

Features of My City Pulse:

First of all, the app is very easy to use. It has three main sections which you can switch around easily. The three sections are Event, Live Map, and Promotion.

• EVENT

You can explore events (concerts, parties or music/art festivals) that are happening in      Kathmandu in this section. If you find an interesting event, you can click it for more details. You can also get directions to the event you like just by clicking "GET DIRECTIONS" button. According to the MyCityPulse, if you log in with your Facebook and click "GET OFFERS" button on any interesting event, you may be eligible for special offers like discount vouchers, free drinks, and free entrance. The comment section on events is quite useful for real customers review. If you are an organizer, you can post your events on this app by contacting the company.

• LIVE MAP

In this section, you can view the exact places where the events are happening on a map. If you turn your GPS on, the map will show the nearest events around you.The events are represented by Pins; and the cool thing is, the pins change color depending on how many people are attending the event. Yellow pin means there are 20 people or less at the event, Green means between 20 to 100 people and Red means there are over a 100 people there. Plus, you can simply click on a pin to get details about the event.

• PROMOTION:

You can check this section to find out about the special offers/deals your favorite businesses are offering. As a customer, you can leave a comment about the experiences you had with the promos so that other customers can read the review before they buy. If you are a business, you can contact My City Pulse to promote your business.     Additionally, according to the company, they will be adding many other features to this app in the future. The aim of the company is to make this app a local social media platform and a traveler's app. The app will work as a local guide for international travelers to find entertaining events and best deals for eating, relaxing and shopping in the near future. However, when I tested this app in beta phase on an android phone, before it was launched officially on 28th December 2017, it had some bugs and guess what? They are still there!

Drawbacks:

1. The images on the preview thumbnail of the events and promos look weird. The forcefully-fitted images on the thumbnails gave me a bad impression about the app. The images could be made more responsive.
2. First, the app didn't notify me to turn on my GPS when I was on the Live Map section. Secondly, even when I turned the GPS on, the app couldn't locate my current position. It seemed like the GPS was not working on the Live Map.
3. I had difficulty exploring the map on the Live Map. When I tried to explore the map by swiping left or right, I was taken to another section instead.
4. The "Get Directions" button on Events and Promotions takes you to another navigation apps ( like Google Maps). This can be a bad thing because sometimes we might not have enough memory on our phone. It would be great if the app could show us the direction from within the app using the Live Map section.
5. The help section of the app has a topic called "What's Happening" which is nowhere to be seen on the app. I personally informed them about this on their facebook page, but it is still there. This makes me doubtful about the seriousness of the company towards the app.

In conclusion, this app looks promising for the benefit of local businesses and tourism. However, with so many bugs and the company not showing any effort for fixing them (even when they were informed about the bugs during beta test) make the app a disappointment.