Today Apple accepted “iBurn 2010,” a free, open source app that our team helped build for Burning Man. Download it on iTunes here.

The app was written last year by long-time burner Jeff Johnson, and this year, we used some of our experience with our outdoors apps to make iBurn 2010 cache data and maps for offline use. You can download and build the app yourself – this is the first time we managed to get this on the App Store, so we hope it sees much wider use this year. It’s worth noting that Apple was very helpful and responsive in getting this posted.

iBurn 2010 makes use of the API provided by Burning Man Earth, and it displays info about camps, art, and events. Most importantly though, it has a map that will help you not get lost in BRC 🙂

If anyone is interested in working on the app, please feel free to hack away, or get in touch with me at andrew@gaiagps.com.

Yesterday, we pushed “iBurn 2010” over to Apple for review. The app is free and open source, works on all iDevices, and provides OpenStreetMap slippy maps, as well as info about Burning Man and Black Rock City. We are hoping it gets approved before the festival begins.

Map of Black Rock City on the iPhone

The project was started by my friend Jeff Johnson last year. It didn’t quite make it to the App Store for distribution in 2009. This year, Jeff, Tom Longson, Anna, Tim, and I conspired to get the code ready to go. Kim Rullo, who does all of our design work, designed the splash screen and app icon, late at night and at the last minute due to my disorganization!

iBurn 2010 splash screen, by Kim Rullo

You can download and build the app yourself; however, please note the 2010 data is not in place yet, so the app will look incomplete. If you switch the controllers to point at the 2009 data, it would work better.

Jeff constructed the entire app – map views, tables, and detail pages – and what our team worked on was making the app more functional offline. Since our hiking apps all revolve around offline functionality and maps (which you need on the Playa), we had some good resources to make the app cache maps and data. We also made it iPhone 4 and iPad compatible, since that is something we have worked on a lot recently.

Below are some screenshots, along with the description we posted for the App Store. We hope this helps festival-goers and onlookers alike. And we hope to bump into some of you in the desert 🙂

The favorites screen, where you can mark events, camps, and art you want to see (swipe to delete)

A Map of Black Rock City on the iPad

Details for an event – details let you tap blue items (coordinates, camps, urls, and emails) to bring up more info

And here’s the description we put on the App Store. The app is still a work in progress, but we think it will serve people well this year. If we get a few more burners developing next year, it will be even better!

iBurn 2010 App Description

Whether you’re going to Burning Man, or just interested, iBurn 2010 is your guide to al the art, camps, and events in Burning Rock City. iBurn 2010 is also open source and totally free.

The app is built to be used offline, within BRC. When you first turn it on, it will cache maps and info about Burning Man to your device. It will also cache any webpages you view via the app.

Feature list:

• caches the maps and API data on start-up (progress bar on map)
• buttons on map to re-cache maps, locate self, and center on the city
• detail pages can center on the item on the map, and show a pin for the place (tapping the pin shows details)
• detail pages also have clickable urls and clickable emails
• any webpage viewed via details gets cached
• events are linked to their camps, so you can locate events
• save favorites (and delete them by swiping)
• works on all iDevices, and is fully auto-rotatable