Should I productize this web app?
Hello fellow hackers! My name is Paul, I'm a long time reader & listener, first time poster.
I made this app a few weeks ago to solve a minor inconvenience. Where i work, we have a lot of meeting rooms, and its hard to remember where each one is. Instead of staring at a fire-exit type floor plan when you're late to a meeting, I figured it would be cool to have an instantly searchable map.
This tool lets you upload a floor plan of your office (or anything else, really!) and draw different rooms or locations. You can then search by the name of the room and it will highlight it for you on the map.
Here's an example gif of the action: https://gph.is/2JqSH0r
You can also try it out for yourself:
http://67.205.142.209/places/uchicago (map of UChicago campus)
http://67.205.142.209/ (create your own)
Keep in mind that it is VERY much an MVP, and the user experience is quite horrible. I figured some feedback would be nice before I put any more work into it.
So, what are your thoughts? Would this be useful to anyone else? Do you think this could be a product and/or monetized?
I could see this being useful. One good application for something like this that comes to mind is conventions. Being able to search a convention floor plan by booth names/companies/booth numbers. Would be really useful. Could sell to event organizers or who ever runs the conventions, they can upload and tag their own layouts and I would assume a free app for viewing these would be available on app stores.
Good idea, Ken - I hadn't thought of that!
It would be cool if it knew your location too, so it could be used like the marauders map in Harry Potter. Obviously thats a hard problem and very far off from this prototype though.
Yeah, being able to show the users location or give the user direction to their destination would be ideal, BUT I still think it would be highly useful without it. I have been lost enough times on a convention floor while looking for specific booths that I know I would find this super useful if it were a thing.
What did you build it in?
The front end is React, Backend is Express, but all the heavy lifting is done by Firebase
very cool. thanks for sharing!
If there are any conference, convention, concert? organizers here - how much would you pay for a product to solve this problem?
Uugh. Not a bad idea, I can see this as a feature on mapwize.io. But as product itself I think it would be a so-so product.
mapwaze seems to be down
Oops! Just a typo. It's wize. I just edited it :)
It is fun. do you have to add the metadata in by hand or can you scan and recognize the text on the image.
Right now you have to add it in by hand. Basically you just click on the image and it draws dots. When you hit 'enter' it connects the dots and draws the overlay. You're welcome to try it out - just head to the base url (http://67.205.142.209/), drop a new image in there and go for it.
I hadn't considered doing OCR, but that's an interesting idea.
OK, working for me now. The highlighting was a bit subtle on my high-res screen. Found PIerce, Ellis, Stagg, but "Rather" didn't work.
oops - forgot to add that one earlier. It's in there now :-)
What is it supposed to do? I searched on "Pierce" and "Garage", didn't find anything.
Thanks for checking it out!
Its should highlight those areas on the map, like in the GIF I posted. Its working for me on Chrome. Does anything happen at all when you type in the searchbar?