I’ve been working on the UI of the Map Creator a lot in the past few days and I am proud to unroll this much needed update. I have gotten rid of most of those horribly janky orange links under the map and replaced them with buttons on the map. I did fix a few bugs here and there as well. Most dealt with the split map behavior.

I had been thinking about adding some relative distance markers on the map or icons to denote the turns. I decided not to include them for now. I think they are really unnecessary from a functionality standpoint and really would just add clutter in usability. I know I said I’d add the distance markers in my first news post but I changed my mind.

The inspiration for this update came from reading 37 signals’ book: Getting Real. It’s aimed at webapp developers but you could apply a lot of what they talk about to many different fields of endeavor. In a nutshell their philosophy is one of elegant minimalism in a web 2.0 world. I really like that idea and I’m trying to incorporate it into this app. This will mean incremental upgrades to the Map Creator whenever I get something new working.

Next on the list of things to do is to clean up the area under the map maybe get a search bar for specific address locating. Who knows I may see something shinier and do something completely different!

Until then I hope you enjoy the work I’ve done. If you have any functions you’d like to see in the map creator leave me a comment and we’ll talk.