Ideas for Geode Comments Off

I was recently pointed to Mike Beltzner’s post on Geode and where it’s going for Firefox 3.next after mentioning the awesome new geotagging built-in to iPhoto ‘09. Five minutes with iPhoto’s new “Places” feature and you’ll realize there’s a lot of great UI work happening right in front of your eyes.

The more I used iPhoto, the more I thought about how Firefox could borrow from a lot of the better geotagging concepts it has introduced to even the most basic of users. There aren’t many players in the geo* market to draw from yet, but the expansion is happening fast and entering the mainstream pretty quick.

Here are a few things I like about the geotagging implementation in iPhoto that I think we can learn from for Geode in Firefox.

Pretty Maps

It’s a simple thing, if you think about it, but Apple has decided not to use the traditional map view from Google Maps and instead use the terrain view by default. The terrain view, of course, still shows roads, cities, and everything else you might want, it just displays them with prettier maps.

Autofill of Common Places

When editing the location of an image that wasn’t geotagged (if you don’t have a fancy new GPS camera like I do), iPhoto autofills the list with common locations as you type. This is in the very same manner as the search box on google.com and the search bar in Firefox. The benefit here is that if you don’t care about the exact address, getting a general city is a few keystrokes away, no need to find it on the map. I’m not sure, but I bet this autofills with common places first, based on where you’ve been. If it doesn’t, it should.

For Geode, we could just as easily have a database of common cities and other places (landmarks and the like) to grab from and display user-entered ones near the top, storing anything the user enters client-side, of course. Doing so would enable someone who, say, frequents a particular coffee shop, to always have that location near the top, likely even in one stroke.

Built-in Search for Finding Specific Locations

If you don’t want to simply enter a city (or if it’s not found), you can click the “New place…” option in the drop down above. That brings up another sheet that allows you to search a map and find specific locations. You can enter cities, towns, house addresses, or even just browse the map and drop the pin wherever you want.

Geode can learn a lot from this. Whether we build in Google Maps or another map provider (or lots of them!), giving users the ability to search and find their specific location is a great feature. Any location that’s added will now appear under “My Places” for easy access.

Specifying a Range

The final feature I really like in iPhoto’s geotagging implementation is the ability to specify the range of accuracy. Translating this to Geode isn’t a far stretch at all. There are many who don’t want their exact address broadcast to websites and finding a decent UI for translating that is hard. iPhoto seems to have hit the right spot.

Overall, I’m impressed with the new iPhoto and I hope we can borrow from and improve on a lot of the ideas that Apple introduced in it when working on integrating Geode with Firefox.