by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
We applied some facelift to Curiosio. It should improve your interaction.
Highlights
For click interface, you will see the country names turning magenta-red on mouseover. This indicates to you that the block is clickable. Click it and you will land on a search page for the country. Though almost everything in Curiosio is clickable/interactive we are highlighting only the most important spots.
For the touch interface, you will see the color change on tap and long tap. Tap will open a search page for the country. Long tap allows a few more options, like opening a new page as a new tab. Curiosio is a conventional web app tested in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, DuckDuckGo browsers, the latest versions of them.
Lazy Search
“Lazy search” is a term we use for a use case when you did not supply any single parameter and just hit [GET TRIP] button. We used to randomly select a point that would be your both start and finish, i.e. round trip. Sometimes we did different points for start and finish. We formed a search request on your behalf. All trip plans were returned for the same parameters.
Not anymore. If you have not provided any specific requirements then Curiosio is more flexible. You will see different start-finish pairs, different trip duration, different budgets, etc.
There is an issue we don’t like — a long waiting time. It could be easily 60s. It was 82s for the recorded case above. Disclaimer: we can reduce the compute time 2x by switching to the faster chips. It will happen when it happens…
So far we are thinking about the faster response in the lazy search case by simply opening a random signature trip for you. It will be instant. You hit [GET TRIP] and get a trip in a second. Then you could experiment with that trip plan by changing-bending it by duration, budget, points, perimeter, people, car.
Missing Point
Once we will redesign the interaction to take place directly on/with the map. We like the “superapp” paradigm of Google Maps. For now, the input interaction is remaining as a web form.
You are entering the points, people, perimeter, money, etc. Only the names of the cities, towns, parks could be the points, not their POIs. We are planning to implement input of POIs, as we can figure out where they belong automatically… but not in the next Beta13.
When you enter something that Curiosio doesn’t understand — Abrakadabra — it will show you this dropdown.
There could be different reasons why we don’t have your point: 1) because you are not using its English Wikipedia naming 2) because it is neither a census settlement nor a park 3) because it is outside the country boundaries that we plugged in (e.g. no Hawaii points in the US, no points from the Arctic Archipelago in Canada) 4) our knowledge graph contains a mistake.
Here is how it looks in action.
You will be able to add your custom points in future versions. Anything, even by pure geo coordinates. So keep patience and stay tuned. What will happen when you hit “Add a point to Curiosio”? This will happen.
