PlanetEye

October 26th, 2007

New in Beta: Breadcrumbs

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

With the Culture Shot we introduced a new way to discover destinations. The idea is to detach geography from the process of deciding where to go next. However, we realized it was a little daunting to click on one of the images in the home page, be taken to a new location on the map and not be sure where exactly we had arrived. Most people would have to zoom out until some familiar geographic feature was visible. This week we have focused on making this process a lot easier:

• We added a breadcrumb object at the top of the map, visible at all times. It is constantly telling you where in the world you are. It is clickable, giving you shortcuts to jump back to the zoom level that best displays your current city and country.

• Although there was a zoom control already, many people suggested it wasn’t easy to use. We have not only improved the look of the zoom control to make it compatible with the general look of the site; we have improved its usability by adding (-) and (+) controls to the sides of the slider to move one zoom level at a time. And it will always be visible, even if you open the Media Panel.
  
  A very cool thing to try is to keep the Media Panel open while you zoom in and out of the map: the contents of the Panel will update to include a selection of the best photos in whichever area you’re looking at.

The world is a more interesting place to discover. We’ve imported thousands of the best travel photos we could find in Panoramio. We’ve focused on some of the top travel destinations such as Cairo, Dublin, St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Budapest, Edinburgh, Beijing, Maui, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Venice, Lisbon, Madrid and Prague. Use the Search box to find them on the map. And if you agree with us that these are great travel photos, be sure to give them 5 stars when you rate them.

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