Itini trip planner: v0.9.4 released

Alexandra Shelenkova
Itini
Published in
4 min readNov 20, 2020

On 20 November we released the new version of our trip planning mobile app. Let’s review the key features that were added.

Main features

1. Nearby places

For a while, we kept receiving feedback from our users that they want to see places around them on the map. They also wanted to be able to add places right from the daily map view, not from a nearby places search as it was in the previous version.

So we decided to spend a big part of the last sprint on map improvements. And the first thing we’ve displayed all the nearby places along the daily route when a small button in the right upper corner is tapped. Adding and removing places became as easy as drawing on the map.

2. Nearby provinces

The same functionality we’ve decided to implement on the trip level maps: it became possible to add or remove any province easily right when seeing the whole trip picture. Isn’t that nice? :)

3. Current location

If you tried to create a trip recently, you might notice that the app is now asking permission to detect your location. There are two reasons for that.

First, you can use your current location as a starting and finishing point for a trip that you create. We realized that during COVID we need to pay more attention to domestic tourism in Thailand (even though the borders might be open soon, it still would take some time for people to feel safe to travel abroad again). So that feature would help to plan trips inside the country starting right from the place where you currently based.

Second, a pretty obvious thing that still took us some time to implement, was displaying your current location on daily maps. So you can understand better where you are and how far the other attractions from your daily trip are from you.

Other small improvements

1. Autocompletion

If you ever tried to look for a place and couldn’t find it because of a typo, you know how annoying it could be. “Chang Mai”, “Chainmay”, “Chiang May” …? That’s why in this sprint we also improved our autocompletion and searching algorithms.

2. Tutorial mode warning

After implementing a tutorial flow in the previous v0.8 sprint, we got feedback that a lot of users still skip it. Ya ya, I know not all the people are patient enough to watch it and yet still many people can’t figure out some features in the app, which we actually courteously serve in the tutorial.

So we decided to add a small warning to prepare users for some “educational time” in the app. And if it’s not a good time right now, users always can skip it for now and get just one more gentle reminder a bit later.

It is still not perfect yet, we keep working hard on the tutorial flow, so please stay tuned :)

3. Google maps integrations

Last but not least we started to display Google Maps for better performance and appearance. Check it out and let us know what you think!

As written above, some of the features we added based on requests from our users. So if you have any ideas or pain that you wanna share with us, please share! We appreciate and consider every feedback and always try to find the best way to satisfy our users and make Itini the best travel app ever. Who knows, maybe your feature request gonna be implemented in the very next version ;)

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