snaptrip: a weekend of changes

I'd hoped to do a lot to snaptrip over the weekend, and I pretty much managed to do what I hoped for. There's a lot of changes which went live today; a lot of them are kind of invisible, but hopefully they're all useful.

Firstly, there's some user interface changes that incorporate suggestions from people within Dopplr. You now have to authenticate with both Dopplr and Flickr before logging in; it was possible to use snaptrip with just the one, but it didn't really make a lot of sense. When you tag photos, they get a border in the city's colour (as they do if they've already been tagged). I've also removed the requirement to load all the photos before tagging them; you now get to do so in batches of 24.

Secondly, the behind the scenes changes. Google App Engine makes it really easy to use memcache to avoid loading data more than once, so I now use that, making reloading pages really quick. There's much better error detection, especially for when a network call to either of the services it relies on fails. I've also fixed the sort ordering in the statistics panel on the trip list page.

show-dopplr-link

Thirdly, I've added a lot more functionality to make use of the location information on both sides. Your map now shows Flickr photos*, and it's a "slippy map", so you can zoom in and out and recenter it. (It also shows the departure point.) It's also possible to use the Dopplr information about trips to add photos to Flickr's map. I should probably make it clear here that snaptrip will never overwrite location data (or trip data) that you've added yourself.

Finally, I had a comment on a previous post asking why you couldn't see trip tags on Flickr. Assuming that snaptrip worked, then the machine tags it's added aren't even shown by default- you have to open the disclosure triangle in the right hand pane. However, if you're using Firefox and Greasemonkey, you can install the show-dopplr-links user script, which will display a badge and link - like those for Upcoming - on each photo page.

Hopefully this isn't the end- there are still features I want to add, and the usage of the app when DopplrHQ first publicised it was a pleasant surprise. I hope these fixes and additions make it useful for you, though.

* Usually. There's a philosophical point I hope to expand on in another post.