Updated prototype
I’ve updated the prototype today to make the geolocation during registration much more resilient. All of the scenarios are now covered - it does its best to locate the street address of the company, then falls back to the city, and eventually the country if it can’t locate the city.
I’ve also updated the interface on this page with instructions that change depending on the accuracy of the geo search.
The top 3 items on the outstanding list in this post have been sorted. It took almost as long as it did to get to the original prototype, but I was being distracted by Olympic medals for GB!
Update : Now when view the home page of the app it will try and figure out your country from your IP address and centre the map on that country. I’ve used the open source IP to country database from MaxMind which is 99.3% accurate. I think this is working but short of a round-the-world trip I’ll need people to let me know if it’s not!
Tags: prototype
August 17th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Yo Dave. I had a go just now. Tried to test the new functionality, but because it insists on a postcode, I couldn’t be ambiguous enough with my input. I’m probably doing something stupid, but it did lead to a question for you…
Should we insist on a postcode? In fact, does everyone even have a postcode? Or, should it be possible to simply place a desk using the map interface? i.e. pan and zoom to the location and drop the marker down? Could come in useful for those time when I take 2 desks down to the middle of Hyde Park and only use one of them!
(This in turn lead to another - much sillier - thought; if I had a spare desk on a boat could I input a link to a GPS feed as its location?! Very useful for that niche luxury yacht / houseboat crowd!)
August 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I agree - I’d thought it was a bit annoying earlier but hadn’t disabled it. Postcode is now optional. The only mandatory fields are:
email
password
first name
surname
company name
address 1
city
country
I think we still need address 1 : there is a tick-box afterall that means that the address won’t be made public.
Let me know when you get your first yacht Rob : I’ll be hot desking on the hot deck most days.