Toilet Map

I have been very busy with projects and the Toilet Map was slightly neglected – but I have still been working on it when I can, and today I made a fairly sizeable upgrade live on the website version of the map.

Technically – the old map would load absolutely everything into your web browser in one big lump – all 947 of the toilets in one go. This meant the map could be quite slow to respond on older computers, and especially Microsoft browsers.

The new version only loads the toilets that are visible on the map that can be seen on the screen, and also I have done away with the classic Google pop-up layers for a (hopefully) better version, which also helps cut down on the map scrolling to load the Google layers.

The other advantage is that the underlying core code I have written is also designed to – eventually – work on the smartphones as well, where you should see considerable performance improvements once I have migrated the improvements to the iPhone and Android apps.

A small upgrade to the facility on the website to submit changes to the toilets on the main map.

You can now change the position of the toilet on the editing page by dragging the marker to the “corrected” location.

An update of the permissions message on the iPhone.

When you install the app for the first time, the Apple platform asks for permission, then the app itself displays the longer message.

It turns out this is a way the iPhone handles location permissions in “webapps” developed by the platform I used – so each time you open the app again, the second longer message will be displayed. It doesn’t affect the performance of the app – but is frankly it’s a bit of a nuisance.

Sorry – it never happened on any of the production tests, so I am irked about this appearing once the app hit the app store.

The team expects to have a fix to remove that – and I will send out the free upgrade as soon as it is ready.

In the meantime a database update will be going out in the next few days, so look out for that.

I am getting a few reports of an error message of sorts on the iPhone app where it asks for the location information twice, once with a quite ugly message.

This (obviously) never happened in the development or testing versions – so I am investigating to find a fix for it.

As reported, it doesn’t affect the functionality of the app, but is quite obviously annoying.

As soon as I have a fix, it will be added to the next database upgrade, which I itching to send out as quickly as possible – although there is a delay of up to a week at Apple as they check everything again before it can be downloaded.

Everything is now live on the website – the main map, the mobile map and most importantly, the smartphone apps.

If you find any bugs, either put the details below or email me and I’ll start looking into them.

Thanks!

Ian

I had some good news yesterday – the smartphone app for use on Apple iPhones has been approved by Apple, and will go live on the iTunes server next Wednesday (2nd March).

The next few days will be spent on the last few remaining bugs on the website and continuing to get more opening hours for those toilets were I currently don’t know what they are.

Then next week, the smartphone apps for both Android and iPhone will go on sale, and I can start SHOUTING LOUDLY about this website.

If you’ve come across this website and wondered why it might be looking a little unfinished, that is because it is indeed still unfinished.

It’s open to the world though so that good old Google (etc) can discover the pages and start priming their search results as I get close to the formal launch the website.

What’s left – the Android and iPhone apps are nearly finished and waiting to be submitted to the apps stores. A bit more polish for the website, and then I can pop the champagne and launch the website to the cross legged public.