Posted by Charlie Mon, 04 Jun 2007 04:24:00 GMT
A quick update - last week we attended Where 2.0 in San Jose so it was a bit of a slow update. However, we're getting near to rolling out custom styles - more information to follow in the next week or so!
Posted by Charlie Thu, 24 May 2007 17:43:00 GMT
Another week - another release - and lots more polish. Today's release has a number of new goodies including:
We'll continue bug fixing and polishing for the next week, and then back to new feature develeopment in June!
Posted by Charlie Thu, 17 May 2007 19:00:00 GMT
We've put online all the hikes from the best-selling guide book Best Hikes With Dogs Colorado. We've also created a new MapBuzz community as an interactive companion to the book.
So browse the trails, plan some hikes, annotate the maps, leave your trip reports and join in the fun!
Posted by Charlie Thu, 17 May 2007 18:30:00 GMT
We're happy to announce that the Wheeler Lakes map was the 500 map created by the MapBuzz community since we launched as an Alpha late last year. Its great to see such great being created - thanks to everyone who has put time and effort into creating their own maps. And if you haven't created a map yet - give it a try - its lots of fun!
Posted by Charlie Wed, 16 May 2007 19:18:00 GMT
A couple of days ago we updated the MapBuzz code base for the 5,000 time in the last 14 months. That equates to 357 changes a month, or 12 updates a day.
Its hard to know what to make of this statistic, since its so dependent on development styles (lots of small changes or fewer big changes), the type of software you are writing, etc. But of curiosity, I wanted to compare it to other projects.
Trac, the software we use for tracking bugs, is up to 5,400 revisions made in about 40 months. So we'll pass them in no time flat :)
Rails, everyone's favorite web framework these days, and what we use to run MapBuzz, is at 6,700 revisions made in about 30 months. So we seem to be on an even faster pace than Rails!
So if success were measured by commits, it seems we are doing pretty well.
Posted by Charlie Wed, 16 May 2007 02:34:00 GMT
Today the contacts page (which is part of the MyMapBuzz page) got a makeover.
If you haven't used that page yet, it lets you create contact lists and then add people to each list. When you first sign up we create three lists for you - friends, family and colleagues. You can of course change these any way like.
With the old interface, it wasn't always obvious if you were editing your contact lists in general or a specific one. The new interface tries to solve that problem by visually linking a contact list to its members. See what you think - hopefully looking at it will make it much more obvious then me trying to write about it!
Posted by Charlie Mon, 14 May 2007 02:29:00 GMT
As part of this weekend's updates, we rolled out an often requested feature - the ability to list the features shown on a map.
When you view a map, you'll notice a new sidebar on the right called "Features." Simply click on it, and you'll see what features are visible on the current map. You can sort the features by name, rating, buzzes and recently updated.
There is still a bit more polishing to do though - when you click on a feature on the map it should highlight it on the sidebar, and vice versa of course. That is still to come.
Posted by Charlie Wed, 09 May 2007 19:46:00 GMT
In a classic post, Joel Spolsky opined that good software takes ten years to write. And then its done (think of Microsoft Word).
I don't know if that's right or not - the longest I've worked on a software project was five years and it was no where close to done. What I do know is that we've just scratched the surface with MapBuzz - there is a long, long list of things we'd like do.
Right now our focus in on polishing - making the site easier to use, making it prettier, fixing bugs, etc. We update the site almost every evening, with every update making the site just a little bit better.
Of course, at the same time we are working on exciting new features. Obviously, those take more time to get right and much more care to rollout - since they often involve data model changes and changes to existing code. They also happen much less frequently, perhaps a few times a month.
So the plan for the rest of May is mostly polishing, with a couple of new features like data import interspersed. Then for June, the focus turns back a bit more towards new functionality development.
Posted by Charlie Mon, 07 May 2007 19:41:00 GMT
Most of our users run Window, so most of our client testing is done on Windows. However, we do test other platforms from time to time, particularly Linux since have a number of Linux boxes around.
Sadly, Firefox is much slower on Linux than Windows, to the point where the zoom box functionality on the map page is unbearably slow. So we spent a couple of hours the other day seeing what could be done. Happily, we were able to dramatically speed it up, so its finally usable on Linux. Now time to test OS X...
Posted by Charlie Wed, 02 May 2007 08:06:00 GMT
Over the last few days, the map editor has received some loving care.
The most important change is a much requested feature - context sensitive tooltips. When you move the mouse over a tool button a popup will appear that explains what the tool does. And when you use the tool, say to draw a line, a hint will pop up telling you how to add an extra point, delete the last point, etc. Hopefully the hints will take a bit of the mystery out of the editor.
We also made it easier to select geometries on the map (lines, areas, rectangles, etc) by making them twice as thick. To avoid obscuring the underlying data, we then made them at 50% translucent. Last, a geometry will remain selected as long as the mouse is "close" to it - which we define as 10 pixels for the moment.
