Woophoo client 0.9 is out!

It makes me very happy to introduce version 0.9 of the Woophoo client which is the last feature release before the beta test.
There are some shiny features and a lot of usability improvements in this release so let us take a look at the highlights:

• Redesigned menu system
  The main menu is less fancy but more usable now. There is no separated map-menu so if you press the menu button on the map you will get to the main menu. The main menu has two columns for faster access and we throw out the icons because they used a lot of space on the display. I personally think that icon-based menus are less usable anyway.
  
  
• State icons on the map display
  Small icons indicate the state of the software on the top-right corner. You can see if the tracking is active, if your fleet is visible, and the vehicle you use.
• Notifying system
  We added a little notifier to the map, similar to the one on the site: it notifies you about every event in the client. It shows events like "loading you bunch" and errors like "cannot log in". We hope that it can shorten the learning curve of the key mapping too.
  
• Experimental route planning
  We integrated the client with the Open Street Map based route planner at http://yournavigation.org.
  
  You can generate a route plan by pressing '6' on the map if you specified a destination. The route plan is displayed as a simple blue trackline yet. You can redesign the plan by pressing '6' twice. (The first press hides the plan, the second loads a new one)
  
  Note that this feature is experimental now, we just want to see the usability of the OSM-based route planning. If we found it usable we will enhance the look-and-feel and start our own route planner server.
  

You can download the client from the Woophoo site or using this direct link: http://woophoo.com/d

Woophoo Agora launched

We just launched Woophoo Agora, the place of the Woophoo community. If you have a question, opinion, bug report, feature request or you just want to have a conversation about Woophoo, try it out!

You can find the link Community Place at the top of the Woophoo site.

Note that the Agora is hosted by Lefora. You can learn more here: free forum hosting by lefora

Track tagging

Tags are simply words you use to describe tracks like 'sightseeing' or 'Paris'. Tagging is a very nice tool for organizing and searching tracks.

You can attach a tag to a track by entering the tag into the 'Add new tag' field and pressing enter. You can do this on your tracks and even on every track you see.

If you just want to browse tracks in a topic just click on 'Search by tag' in the basic search section to open our tag cloud. You will get a lot of tags, and the size of each tags show you their popularity. If you click on a tag, you will get a list of tracks associated with that tag.

There is a 'Display my tags only' checkbox under the tag cloud, if you check that box you will see only the tags you added to tracks. This is an easy way to organize your tracks.

Just try it!

How to embed your Woophoo bunch on your blog

It's easy to embed a public Woophoo bunch on your blog or site.

If you are a member of a public bunch, just click the 'Embed this bunch on your blog' link. You will get a window with some html code and a preview. The html code is now auto-copied to your clipboard so you just need to paste it into your blog. To accomplish this go to your blog post, switch to html view (In Blogger: 'Edit Html') and paste the html code by right-clicking and selecting 'Paste' from the drop-down menu.

In all probability, your blog system is unable to display the bunch while editing so you must change to preview or publish the post to see the result. Because of this my practice is just to embed the bunch when the posts's text is done.