Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Upgrade to Walkscore Widget

As with most things a good does of FAIL makes things better. So why not make a list of all the things that I did wrong.

  • Ugly is not OK. Sure in development land ugly works but users don't use ugly crap with maybe a few exceptions like myspace.
  • Small is good. Especially on a mobile phone's home screen. Yep my widget was taking up twice the space it needed. I ended up having to create a full activity to do this but such is life.
  • Noise. Basically I had some additional text to help explain that they could not get walkscore if they had disabled the phones ability to locate them. Now that I added the feature to lookup any address they can have all phone location disabled and still use walkscore from the phone.
The only user comment I got also said they wanted more options. Unfortunately there are not many options to give. Either you have a walkscore for the current location or the address entered or you don't. 

A couple features I would like to add are first an address suggestion. If the user enters an address in that has a list of suggestions then I need to let them choose the address currently I just pick the first one. Another feature I need to add is to track the number of times the score is retrieved because I am currently limited on how many request I can make to the walkscore servers a day. Mega thanks for the icons goes to the great Wylie Fisther

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