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NOTE: I’ve since taken BeerMe off the Market - temporarily. Apparently for some users it crashes, so I’m going to fix it up and re-release it.

Today I was finally able to publish an application that I helped out on partly, initially for Dave Johnson’s presentation at Where 2.0 back in May of this year. It’s called BeerMe, and the concept is simple: based on your current location, where is the closest beer? I find myself asking that question a lot, so I figured I might as well make a mobile application that does the job for me.

Dave’s original source for the Where 2.0 app can be found here. My source for the app is right here. Big thanks to Yohei for making the icon and image.

BeerMe uses YQL to retrieve establishments tagged with ‘alcohol’ and/or ‘beer’, and retrieves the closest ones based on a GPS proximity search. The application parses the results and maps them out onto a Google map of your location for you. YQL is awesome, but one limitation is that the data that I am tapping is only an aggregate of U.S. locations. You can, however, contribute to the open data tables, and right through GitHub too! I’m going to see what I can do to contribute - maybe you should too

BeerMe is only in its first version, so there are a few things I still want to do:

• Be able to grab more information about beer locations (name, address, etc.) through the UI.
• View the beer locations in a sortable list.

If you’re on an Android phone, you can grab BeerMe directly from the Android Market by clicking here , wait, nope, not yet. Soon! Here’s a snapshot of BeerMe v0.1 in action:

As you can see, apparently the closest beer in Vancouver is in Point Roberts, just over the border . Going to have to get some Canadian content into it for it to be useful for me. Anyways, if you have any comments/suggestions about the app, please feel free to leave them here!