Posted by Charlie
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:34:00 GMT
The MapBuzz website has grown fairly large. One of the downsides of having a large site is that it takes a lot of time to ripple updated user interfaces throughout it. One of the oldest pages was the search results page, which to be blunt, was dreadful. Take a look:
Some obvious problems:
- The color scheme is dreadful
- Most people don't see the filter bar at the top that let's you limit search results to a particular type of thing (maps, features, etc.)
- Results are sorted alphabetically, as opposed to being groupd by type
Taking all those usubility problems into account, here is the new, improved search results:
Things to notice:
- The color scheme is a lot more pleasant
- Most filter bar on the left is a lot more obvious, as is the currently selected filterd
- Results are grouped by type, and them sorted alphabetically
Better isn't it?
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Posted by Charlie
Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:44:00 GMT
We are happy to announce a partneship with the Colorado Mountain Club (CMC), the premier hiking club in Colorado. More details can be found in the press release, but the basic idea is to combine CMC's large catalog of hikes with MapBuzz's social mapping features. We'll be running seminars next week at CMC's headquarters in Golden, and look forward to building the best online collection of outdoor trips in Colorado over the coming months.
To get started, you can visit our new, online Colorado Mountain Club community.
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Posted by Charlie
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:44:00 GMT
<p>Its always embarrassing when critical bugs slip through our testing and get deployed to production. Over the weekend we deployed an update the broke our reset password functionality. Thus if you didn't remember your password, then there was no way to get it back. Luckily a couple of users quickly alerted us to the problem.</p>
<p>The reset password functionality is some of the oldest code in the system and has full functional test coverage, but not selenium test coverage. The difference is that functional tests are run from a command line while selenium tests are run from a browser.</p>
<p>So what happened? Of course all of the functional tests passed, otherwise the deployment would have failed. What happened was the tests were wrong. A few weeks ago we made a couple of changes to better protect passwords to prevent them being logged to our bug database. Those changes caused the reset password interface to change slightly, but the old one was left in place by mistake. So the functional tests were exercising the older interface, while clients started using the newer untested interface. And thus the problem slipped through.</p>
<p>Looking back, we made two obvious mistakes. First, the older interface should have been immediately removed. Second, we did not have adequate Selenium test coverage. Both issues are now fixed, so I feel pretty confident that bug won't create back into the system again.</p>
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Posted by Charlie
Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:19:00 GMT
We've been able to import data, such as GPS tracks and ESRI shapefiles, into MapBuzz for quite some time now. And we provide access to our content via Atom feeds. But some of our users have asked us to support exporting our content to good old-fashioned shape files. Always wanting to please, we are happy to announce that we now support exporting data to shape files.
To see it in action let's export the Lunch Near CU map. If you follow the link to the map you'll see an Export button. When you click it, you'll download a Zip archive that contains a shape file for each type of geometry shown on the map (in this case points and lines).
You can use almost any GIS product to view the files. Free options include:
Here is a screenshot from uDig:
Its not very pretty without the base map or any stylinging information, is it?
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Posted by Charlie
Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:41:00 GMT
While at Smallworld, a lesson drilled into my head time and time again was the importance of printing. By far the most common use case - someone logs into an online mapping system, zooms to address, turns on the features they want to see, and creates a printout. Its nice to dream that the web will change this, perhaps once we all have Blackberries and iPhones in our pockets, but today is not that day.
Unfortunately, browsers have a reputation of being lousy at printing, partly due to their poor typography support, differences between print preview and the actual printed pages and of course random differences between browsers.
On the bright side, browser support printing-specific CSS stylesheets, which is an amazingly powerful feature. With a lot of patience, experimentation and perservence, its actually possible to make a good looking printout from a browser. To see what I mean, take a look:
http://www.mapbuzz.com/map/print/1686
Not bad, is it? In fact, we are quite proud of our accomplishment 
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Posted by Charlie
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:01:00 GMT
Over the last few months we've spent a lot of time with users seeing what they like and don't like about MapBuzz. One message that came through loud and clear was that it was hard to see what you could do on each page. The problem was that the allowed actions, like editing a map, were too hard see since they were exposed as hyperlinks in the top right of the page.
As a result, we've completely revamped how actions are shown on each page. Here is an example for a map:
The actions are now shown as big buttons, with associated icons. So far early feedback on this change has been very positive - let us know what you think!
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Posted by Charlie
Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:46:00 GMT
One of the coolest things about Facebook is its news feeds, which make it easy to keep up with what your friends are doing. So borring a page from Facebook, we've implemented the same thing for MapBuzz:
So now its easy to keep up with your friends and communities.
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Posted by Charlie
Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:33:00 GMT
Besides working on new features and bugs, we spend a lot of time tweaking existing pages to make them simpler and easier to use. Of course, the most important page on most sites is the home page. Not only do you have to convey to first time visitors what your site is about, but you also have to make them interested enough to use it.
Feedback from users made it clear that our previous homepage had too much wasted space. We also discovered users liked the map that automatically zoomed to their current location, and liked the featured maps and communities on the bottom. Based on that feedback, we kept the map and made featured maps and communities more visible.
So when you get a chance take a look at tour new home page and let us know what you think!
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Posted by Charlie
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:21:00 GMT
Two things made Google maps popular - its interactivity and its hackability. Users were delighted when they discovered you could simply hold down the mouse button and drag a map around. Today, any map that doesn't support that functionality seems "dead".
However, for power users, navigating around a Google map can quickly get tedious. The main problem is that you can't quickly zoom in or out of an area.
Well, we think we've solved that problem. On MapBuzz, if you hold the shift key down and then drag a map, you see a navigation box appear:
The way this works is by dragging to the:
- Bottom right you zoom into the selected area
- Top left you zoom out
- Top right takes you to your previous location (you can go all the way back to your first location)
- Bottom left cancels the navigation box and does not change your location
Obviously this feature is only for power users, but once you discover it you'll see that it is a very fast, powerful way to navigate through a map.
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Features | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:48:00 GMT
Last week we pushed an update that added icon categories. If you take a look at the screenshot below, you'll see a two default categories - City and Outdoor. The outdoor icons, which are part of our new icon library, are shown on the right.
So far we've added city and outdoor icons. Coming soon are sports icons and flag icons.
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