Using the Trailer web application

This page describes how to use the Trailer web application.
The screenshots for this page were captured using the Chrome browser on OS/X, which is the primary test browser for the project.
Other browsers may behave differently. See notes at the end of the page for notes on other browsers.


The Trailer web application is available at http://tl-trailer.appspot.com. The default page for the application looks like this:

If you click on the item 'Featured Trails' in the navigation area on the left of the screen, you will see a list of trails by other users which have been shared for public use.

The sharing feature isn't fully implemented in the present version of the application, so all of the trails presently displayed in this area are test trails created by the application developer. If you already have a copy of the iOS trailer application, you will recognize that the four trails which ship with the application (Rome, Venice, Paris and Barcelona) are among the trails displayed here.

If you click on the '...' button to the right of any of the city names in the table on the right, you will be taken to a page which features the trail you selected.  For example, the page for the Barcelona trail looks like this:

If you are lucky enough to be in one of the cities which already has a featured trail, there are two ways of getting it into your iOS device:

• you can click on the URL which appears in the pane just above the table of zones to the right of the map, which should cause the trail to download in the form of a file with a name like 'trail_nnnn.tqz' which can be attached to an email for reading in your iOS device; or 
• you can cut and paste this URL into an email, or copy it by hand using Mobile Safari on the device.  

Either way, when the attachment or URL is received on the device, it should cause the new trail to be added to the list of trails available for display in the iOS application.

If you aren't in a city for which a trail is already defined (or even if you are but you want to define your own trail), this can be done by logging in to the application.  Click on the 'Sign in' button in the top right of the screen, and Google will present a login/password screen (probably - if you already use Gmail or other Google products Google may be able to log you in automatically).  Once you are logged in, the navigation bar on the left hand side should contain a new item 'My trails', like this:

From this page, it is possible to add your own trails.  To add a new trail, first type the name and country of the city or town into the entry field near the bottom right of the 'my trails' view:

Then click the '+' button, which will (hopefully) cause the application to display a map, of the town or city which was named, based on coordinates obtained from Google's geocoding service.   This view will also have an entry field near the bottom right, which can be used to add zones to the trail.  To add a zone, type in the name of a landmark to mark the centre of the zone, or an address).  For example, on a trail of London, you can add a zone centred on the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square by typing its name into this entry field and pressing the '+' button to request geocoding.

With a bit of luck, the landmark name or address will be recognized, and the application will display a view with a marker placed appropriately (if the landmark name or address is not recognized a marker will be placed at the centre of the map).

When the new view is displayed, the following entry fields on the right hand side of the form will be populated:

• name will contain the string used as the landmark or address when creating the zone;
• latitude and longitude will reflect the position of the landmark;
• radius (metres) will contain a default radius value of 250m set by the application.

The user can fill in the other entry fields on the form (and possibly change the value of the 'name' entry field).  If the geocoding process has placed the marker in a different position from the one preferred, the user can drag the marker across the map to change the latitude and longitude (these changes will only take effect if the user presses 'save changes').  When the fields are set according to the user's intentions, press 'save changes' to return to the view for the trail, which will now contain an entry in the right hand table for the zone which was just saved.

The next zone to be added is for the '100 Club' music venue at 100 Oxford Street.  Google's geocoding web service doesn't recognize this as a landmark name, so the easiest way to add it is by putting the address in instead, then editing the fields once the address has been geocoded:

The user can continue to add zones until all of the places they wish to visit or have notes on are included:

As discussed above, the URL specified in the panel on the right above the list of zones can be used either to download a TQZ file for attachment to an email, or can be copied directly into the address bar of Mobile Safari or into an email to be sent to the iOS device.

The user can create multiple trails.  On both the trail list screen and the zone list screen for each trail the '...' button can be used to navigate down into the trail/zone and edit zone properties, and the 'x' button can be used to delete a zone from a trail or a trail from the 'my trails' view.

Notes on other browswers:
The web application has been developed using Chrome on OS/X Lion and Mobile Safari on Retina iPad as the primary target browsers.  These are the recommended browsers for the application.

Limited testing has been done on a number of other platforms including:
Safari on OS/X Lion
Firefox on OSX/Lion and Windows 7
Internet Explorer 8 and 9 on Windows 7
Chrome for iOS on Retina iPad

The app is believed to broadly work on all of the platforms listed above with the following qualifications:

• differences in rendering behaviour cause some fixed size panels to display vertical and/or horizontal scrollbars on some platforms; and
• dragging map markers does not work on Chrome for iOS on Retina iPad

Updated 11 September 2012: 

The page has been modified to reflect changes which have been implemented to make IE8 and IE9 useable and to improve experience on other secondary browser platforms.  

Version 15 of the web application included these improvements.  After I released this version I discovered that it contained code which caused runtime errors when drilling down to zone details, so I reconfigured the site to default to an earlier version for a while.  I believe these errors are now fixed in version 16, please contact me if you run across problems.