By Shaik Zakeer Hussain, TwoCircles.net,
You might know the name of the mosque located in your neighbourhood or even most of the well-known mosques in your city or country, but do you know, where the great mosque of Ouakam, or the Hidayatuddeneyah mosque is? With Mappy Mosque, you will not only be able to locate mosques you never knew existed, you would also be rewarded to do just that. Well, online reward points we mean!
Brainchild of husband and wife duo Zarrar and Sadia Chishti, who run the game development firm Tentacle Solutions in Glasgow, Scotland, Mappy Mosque, was created as an experimental website to raise awareness of mosques from around the world in the form of a fun and accessible game.
The game is very simple informative, and will surely be welcomed by children and adults alike.
Once logged into the website, the site auto-populates an image of a mosque, which needs to be located on the map. Full points if you locate it accurately, partial points if the location you place is close by.
Sadia, speaking to TCN, said, the idea to build the site occurred while her company was coming up with marketing ideas for their Islamic Mobile Apps. A lot of them in the team she says, although were able to identify a mosque, but were not able to place it on a map. So they quickly developed this web app which utilises Googles Maps to allow people to test themselves.
Launched a few days into Ramadan, she says they have been inundated with positive messages from users who are using it as a lunchtime go-to site during the holy month.
The website currently has a database of over 500 mosques, which is growing every day. Sadia says that her team “found it notoriously difficult to get Geo Locations on a lot of mosques, especially in Europe. In most cases, we could not get Google Maps to locate the mosques and websites such as Wikipedia would not have any information on them. However, the mosques did exist!”
They eventually came up with a very novel and innovative way to get the geo details of these mosques. Sadia explains: “There are a lot of Anti-Islam/Anti-Sharia websites where their users “warn” of any mosques in their local areas. We were able to extract the EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) and Geo code from the images and thus have an exact pin point of the mosques for our database!”
Zarrar and Sadia Chishti
The site also has an option to add your own local mosque to the database, and people have started to take the opportunity to add their neighbourhood mosques.
The Chishtis, whose company’s clients include Cartoon Network, Lush, and Legal & General to name a few, also develop a range of Islamic apps for iOS and Android devices.
Their most successful app is Islamic Quiz & Games, which is for iOS. This consists of a multiple choice quiz, and over 40 Islamic themed puzzles and games: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/islamic-academy-quiz-puzzles/id532231639?ls=1&mt=8
They have also made separate Islamic Quiz, Mosque Puzzles, Art Puzzles and Spot the Difference apps for both iOS and Android. They are currently completing a huge Islamic app for mobiles that was partly funded via a fundraising promotion last year. It is called Islamic World of Adventure and will be available on both Android and iPhone formats.
Mappy Mosque website: http://www.mappymosque.com/