We’re happy to announce that we now support Push Notifications on our custom applications. We’ve been working on a lot of features behind the scenes, including some cool tour guide and medical apps. We’ll be releasing more features soon.

Let us know what you need, and we’ll add it to the list!

We’re getting ready to launch our SXSW Party Planner. The app has been submitted to the app store, but since LocalBeacon doesn’t REALLY need to go through the App Store to be usable, why not try it out right now by visiting http://www.bigforge.com/sxsw/

If you have events that you want to publish in the app, please submit them to http://www.bigforge.com/sxsw/post/

More importantly, we’ll be giving away an iPad to a lucky person that tweets about our app. All you have to do is tweet the following:

I’m using the #SXSW Party Planner from @bigforge! Check it out, and enter to win an iPad! http://bit.ly/cTQ3nv

LocalBeacon 2.6 has been released.

This version adds photo galleries and tons of minor bug fixes! UI Improvements too. Check it out.

We’ll be working on push notification support next. Watch for it!

Since I was recently given a hard time for having more content in my TOC than in the blog, I’ve decided to put this space to good use. I’ll be posting various short posts about things that I’ve run into and my workarounds.

First one… I recently installed Snow Leopard. Since all of the web development is done with Python and Django, I installed 64 bit everything, including Python and MySQL. How I did that is a whole other post, but tonight, I realized that the python hash function now can return VERY large numbers. If you’re developing in 64 bit, and you store the hash of any object, make sure that the column type in the database is BIGINT, or you’ll get warnings with every save.

The next release of LocalBeacon is pretty close. For the next release some of the key features are:

• Facebook -> iPhone App. Turn your Facebook fan page into an iPhone application with just 2 clicks (one to login, one to create the channel)
• Tighter integration with YouTube and external content. Will keep your users in the app longer.
• More options to organize your content, including using a bottom tab bar instead of the buttons on the home page to navigate from category to category.

We’re also looking for a newspaper partner to try a more robust integration strategy so everything gets published automatically. If you’re the publisher of a newspaper of any size (college, community, etc.), let us know!