TL;DR
We’re developing an open-source travel visualization app called MemoLanes. It’s currently in small-scale testing, and I recently switched from Fog of World to MemoLanes during a trip to Australia and New Zealand. If you’re interested in joining the internal testing, feel free to email me(zed@zijun.dev)!
Project Link:https://github.com/MemoLanes/MemoLanes
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been pretty addicted to an app called Fog of World, and during 2021 and 2022, I spent quite a bit of my spare time developing a third-party extension tool called Fog Machine.
Through this process, I picked up some knowledge about this domain and started forming my own ideas. It might just due to being a programmer, but I often find myself thinking about how I would design things differently, how I would implement the feature.
I roughly formed this idea around April 2023, and it took me about a month to go from trying to come up with a name to giving up on naming it altogether (There are three hard software engineering problems: 1. naming; 2. cache invalidation; 3. off-by-one errors).
Then in May, on a work trip to London, I created a folder with the weird codename ProjectDV
on the plane and started designing the data structure and choosing the tech stack. After a bit over a year working on this part time, I kicked off small-scale testing around August this year.
The motivation behind this project is pretty straightforward: I felt I could achieve about 80% of the core functionality of other similar apps and solve some personal pain points while having a good extensibility. Mainly, it is for my use, and since it is built, I figured I might as well spend some effort to make it a semi-formal product. It won’t be highly commercialized, and the core code is open-source (though some optimizations that don’t affect core functionality will be closed-source, similar to how VSCode works).
To be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing, but some test users have already used MemoLanes as their primary app, while I’ve been too scared to fully commit😅. A trip I had in early October gave me the perfect opportunity to switch over (though I still used an old phone with Fog of World on as the backup plan, just in case). The overall performance exceeded my expectations: no major issues, just a few minor problems: one being unavoidable (GPS drift, though a better filtering algorithm might help), and the rest have already been fixed#127 #130.
The final result is shown below. However, keep in mind that the current UI and map rendering are purely for debugging purposes and are very basic. They don’t represent the quality of the final product.
We’re already working on these optimizations.
Lastly, here are some travel photos.