Planning, Discovering, and Optimizing Food on Your Journeys
By Cecil
Recently I have finished a lot of rework on the "Food & Dinning" tab. Before it was just a little basic. It wouldn't give you a lot to work with. You could have a link to the menu, you could add some notes, and you could publish the food item to be a Journey item. Which was a passable first version.
But here is where the rework begins!
First thing that I added in was the ability to tie a food item to a location. Before you could kinda do this using the "address" field. But now you can explicitly mark "ramen" as belonging to "Japan", or you can say Rai Rai Tei belongs to "Yamaguchi City". Because everything is Gucci, in Yamaguchi.
That was a fun little thing to add in. And that alone added a lot of value I think. But it got the creative juices flowing a bit on this whole tab and what it could be.
The next step was to make it so if you have added an address to the food item that we can link out to it. So now you will see that if there is an address you can click on it, and it will open up a new tab to Google Maps with a search of that address. That was fun, and I actually stole the idea from another project of mine. But is it really plagiarism if I steal from myself?
Next was to make the location selection a little smarter. I figured, you know if a user is going to type out an address it is pretty likely that it is going to tie to a location that they have already added. So now, as you type out the address it will automatically try to match to a saved location.
(^ Camera footage of me as I was working on all of this)
Then I started to think about the recently added "Funds" tab. And I thought, "sure would be nice to just have an idea of how much things cost". And you know what? Being the guy building the whole thing, I can just do that. So I added in a price range field. That way you can know Sid's Garage is a nice burger and shake place around $20 a person, but The Brickyard is a nice steak place that is gonna be more like $100.
Finally, taking a little inspiration from address link feature I thought it would be super nice to be able to search from Journeys and find some food options. Cause maybe you notice on your upcoming anniversary road trip that you don't have any idea of what you are going to have in Portland. So I added a new little button that will link you to Google Maps with a search of "food near {Portland}". So that way you can get started on finding some nice places, or cheap places, or close places to eat.
Anyways, by now this is probably what you look like reading this very amazing blog post(tm)
I can't help that. It's just my natural charisma I suppose.
I have a couple other ideas of things that I can add and modify to make this part of your Journey planning even better. But you'll have to stay tuned to what those even are.
Thanks for reading and hanging out. I always appreciate the support! Check out some of the other blog posts, and play around with Journeys! Pretty much the greatest trip planning tool out there(tm)