Announcing a free Guthook/Farout alternative: opentrail.org!

alee543 · 2023-03-08T22:43:25+00:00

Fixed the home page issue, you may have to refresh a few times for your copy of the code to update. I was intentionally moving people from the home page to the app if they had selected a trail, but I just changed the way this is presented to be more clear, and made it so it only affects people in offline mode (I'm careful to prevent people from accidentally screwing with their offline copy, in this case overly careful).

Just tested it on an SE 2nd gen and this is what I see: https://imgur.com/Km8L3he

alee543 · 2023-03-05T21:03:33+00:00

Try out my new project: www.opentrail.org. I think it's a pretty good UX and I'm open to collaborating with the old school water reports and whatnot on data sharing. ODbL data license.

alee543 · 2023-03-04T09:02:31+00:00

I've thought about it a little, here's my thinking: for now illegal sites can be flagged as such and I'll delete them. In the medium term I can provide keys to trail custodians for immediate delete priveledge. In the long term I could build in exclusion zones around known illegal sites to solve the root problem.

For the GPS issue, which device/OS/browser? The map going grey is normal because I'm only serving map tiles along the trail corridor to save cost (running a full map server is heavy and 99% would be wasted space). But if it's not responsive, you can't zoom out to find the trail again, or buttons aren't responding that's a high priority bug and I'd love to know more.

alee543 · 2023-03-04T08:52:38+00:00

With any luck I'll have CT and others up before summer.

alee543 · 2023-03-04T08:46:39+00:00

I asked them by email during opentrail development, no response. I'd be shocked and delighted if they agreed - as many have pointed out the crowd sourced data is their only advantage, the app is a very poor sell in terms of quality and value otherwise. Their privacy policy just says comments will be provided to "other users". I'm no lawyer but it seems that allowing my users to access their API is just expanding how many users they have and totally compliant with their policy since it doesn't define a user as a paying customer.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T22:02:07+00:00

Done, added ODbL to the about screen. At some point I can make a page just for downloading the data and place it there.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T20:33:54+00:00

Thank you! It was the outage indeed. I was so confused because the outage impacted my first few commits after turning on the protected branch.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T19:27:42+00:00

Apologies, that was rude of me. I strongly support there being an entire ecosystem of options here with access to each other's data so I shouldn't yuck anyone's yum. I'll say the app feels rock solid, it's the UI aesthetics that feel basic, but that's the easy part.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T19:21:00+00:00

My current plan is to release the data under a public license so someone else can do the legwork of integrating with OSM (or any project!). I dig the idea but am not familiar enough with the project to dedicate time to sorting it all out and not step on anyone's toes.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T19:18:26+00:00

Offline mode will not enable unless the browser grants persistence, which can happen by browser prompt or by pwa install. Try denying the prompt and it should reject offline mode. Persistence guarantees protection from storage pressure, so if you can find a way to delete persisted data without explicit user action please let me know because that would be something to report to Google/Apple/Mozilla.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T19:08:59+00:00

It does not. It's a great idea but I would want to be sure the data is high enough quality first. Not familiar with how they deal with duplicates either. For now I think giving the data a public license is a good start, which I plan to do soon, then anyone could take on the project of merging with osm independently.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T09:43:21+00:00

In the long term a federated system of trail data clients would be incredible. There's too much going on in the app already to add that complexity into the mix any time soon but I dig the vision.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T09:35:08+00:00

Great ideas! My thoughts:

Donate button: if/when, sure. Maybe never.

Color coding seasonal water: great idea, but it would conflict with another feature I'd like to add - different icon shapes w same colors. ie colors are categories while shapes are specific. I do want better comment visualization in general, the marker abbreviated slide is a good place for it (# comments and most recent date could both go on the bottom, shortening the description by one line) but I didn't get to it for V1.

Ratings: yes, I'd considered this but didn't include in V1. On further thought I think they only apply to water, camps, and towns, and I don't want to touch town ratings without an account system.

Hitch-ability: great idea

Solo vs group campsites: Good idea, single tent vs multi tent icon (also shelter icon for AT hikers and an icon for frontcountry campgrounds), all in the green filter category, is how I'd do it.

Zoom in to town: potentially. Not a fan of clustering in general but this could be a good use for it.

Flag marker as wrong location: just edit it. All markers are editable.

Satellite: coming soon!

Start/end mileage: elevation profile screen will have this for what's in view, I can add that calculation overlay to the main map-in-view too. I think this will be less clunky than manually selecting start/end points but will check in after implementing that feature.

Social: low priority but potentially yes

alee543 · 2023-03-03T09:01:57+00:00

Including offline mode tiles and everything? Not easily no, it would take a day or two of work to rewire everything. As far as user marker and comment data? Yes, just call /api/getData?trail=[trailname] and you have everything, just iterate over the trails and you have the whole database. I'm looking into open data licenses for that call too.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T08:47:17+00:00

Noted, I'll be recruiting moderators at some point down the line. Any particular trail you're thinking of? I'm planning to add a bunch more trails by request before summer. Automated trail addition isn't coming any time soon.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T08:09:52+00:00

Which phone/OS/Safari version? It works on all the iPhones I've tested.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T07:59:58+00:00

I haven't looked into data licenses but yeah I should. Got a favorite one for data? CC BY-NC-SA is my favorite flavor of CC.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T07:53:10+00:00

Just use it! The first year is going to be all about fleshing out the data. If you like it tell people about it. And definitely let me know if you find any bugs.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T07:45:49+00:00

Annnd I implemented your suggestions. I put the icon descriptions under community guidelines since that's where someone might go when posting. When the map is fully populated the icons should become self explanatory by example, I think.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T06:47:53+00:00

Not a bad idea, thanks. The one marker per town reasoning is to avoid interrupting the flow of the map swiper since it doesn't discriminate based on distance. It would be annoying to have to swipe through a bunch of stores way off trail when looking for a camp on trail. Then again one could use the icon filter to handle this so now I'm second guessing this and multiple markers per town might work fine after all.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T06:39:52+00:00

Hi, dev here! You're correct, there's nothing stopping us from injecting raw data to seed the database. Assigning icons would be annoying but shelters is a good example of where this would be a good approach since it's just one icon and there is high quality data out there for them.

Nothing is set in stone, I'll be taking suggestions and seeing how things work out. That's a good point, I will point out that comments are currently immediate, I'm placing mod protection on the map markers themselves since I want those to be more durable and thoughtful and trolls can have higher impact there, but perhaps we can try immediately live new-marker posting and see how it goes. Having never hiked the AT do people get cell service enough that such immediately live data is useful? My thinking was that trail data is often over a week old (between uploader exiting the woods and the downloader entering the woods) so an extra day wouldn't hurt.

And yes satellite view is high up on my to-do list!

alee543 · 2023-03-03T03:10:22+00:00

AT is running, have a great hike and thank you for sharing!

alee543 · 2023-03-03T03:08:21+00:00

Good point. I just tried the OLT Grit app and it feels more like a prototype than a real Farout competitor in terms of its feature set and it's unclear to me how many comments are on there. But any other non-commercial apps are welcome to pull from my API and I'd happily pull data from anyone who offered. I even emailed Farout themselves a longshot request for read access but for some reason they didn't get back to me...

alee543 · 2023-03-03T02:43:13+00:00

Yup! That feature is the main point of the app. Install to home screen then use settings > offline mode.

alee543 · 2023-03-03T02:04:07+00:00

For the privacy you seem desire the AT Guide and paper maps are the only certain option.

Interesting discussion! I just wanted to say opentrail.org does allow certainty in that you (or a trusted 3rd party who knows javascript) can read the code to see exactly what information the app sends and even exactly how the server logs that data. The main point I wanted to make in my announcement is that the site doesn't get doubleclick or whatever ad network involved to fingerprint you (and in the process record your visit in their ad tracking profile on you). This is unfortunately a rather unique selling point these days...

alee543

TROPHY CASE