Flaming Desks is a blog…

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!

This version of the app wouldn’t normally be shown to a client but, in the spirit of this project, here it is.

http://www.flamingdesks.com/app/

What I’ve concentrated on here is the trickiest bit : getting global geo location data into the app, which is relatively easy using the geocoder from Google. With this version you can register any address in the World and it will store your details in the database and plot all of the addresses on a global map.

I’d stress at this point that there is a lot more work to do! Amongst the outstanding work is:

• strategy for addresses which can’t be found. At the moment you can move markers, but I’d like you to be able to add a marker to a country and then move it around within that country to position it.
• There’s a bug if you search again once it has found an address : it creates two markers
• The geocoder doesn’t always find the address. I try a different variation of the address lines if this happens, but this needs a lot more work to make it run smoothly. There are probably lots of valid addresses that it won’t currently work for : it needs to try different combinations of addresses, starting with the most specific and working back to the city and country only : then hopefully we’ll get a marker for every address that’s entered.
• Implement photo uploads
• Implement company type drop down
• All of the desk functionality : adding desks within an office etc
• Filtering on the front end of the map
• Search and zoom on the front end of the map (i.e. search for London and it zooms to London from the globe and you can see relevant offices plotted on it)
• Implement the Google marker manager in anticipation of 1000s of offices (!) to help performance
• Forgotten password functionality
• Login, my account etc
• Plug in the design

For now, if you’re interested in giving it a go please do. All data will be thrown away, but if you’ve been interested enough to test it, we’ll put you on the list for a notification when it goes live, so feel free to put your real email address in. If you find any addresses that it fails for, or you spot any pitfalls, bugs, or have any suggestions, please post the details in a comment.

[winces and hits the publish button...]