Pinball Map App Update 5.2.18
We released our most substantial app update of 2023! This one addresses a number of bugs that we discovered after adding Sentry crash reporting. It also includes new features and some significant design revisions. Let’s get to it!
New Features
Added a button on Location Details for viewing all the updates/activity at that location. Shows machines added, removed, machines comments, high scores, and line-up confirmations.
The button looks like this:
Added radius options to the Recent Activity screen, so you can see recent updates that are further away (helpful for rural or more sparse areas). Rather than the default 30 miles, you can toggle to 75 or 150 miles.
Bug Fixes
Android: Couldn’t add phone numbers to the Location Submission form. Some weird bug where the numbers would reset when you started typing them in. Oops!
Issue when backspacing in the “Country” search field in the Location Submission form. Probably not encountered that often, but now it’s fixed!
After submitting a location, the app wasn’t properly navigating you out of that screen, so users sometimes thought the submission didn’t go through. This was resulting in confusion about whether the submission was truly submitted, and then people submitting multiple times.
Design Updates
Replaced Lato font with PT Sans. This is basically because we like lowercase “l” letters that don’t look like capital “I”.
Redesigned Location Details, Location List, and Machine Details screens.
Tweaked colors (higher contrasts to be more accessible, added purple, etc.) and other things.
Do not display most recent machine comment under each machine on the Location Details screen (instead, all comments can be viewed by clicking the machine). This change might be unwelcome to some people. But aside from now having a cleaner design, we are trying to address the issue of users battling each other to have the most recent comment. We want to de=emphasize the importance of the most recent comment.
Cool animation when you click the “heart” icon to favorite a location (and un-favorite)
Misc
Added little notes in some places to help guide users (on Machine Comment form and Edit Location Details screen). Trying to address things like: people leaving comments saying “machine is done” rather than just removing the machine. And people leaving location notes saying “moved to a new address”
Many other tweaks and bug fixes and performance improvements
Comments
When will the mobile app map display markers with numerals, instead of the standard red Google markers, indicating the number of machines present the same as on the website map?
dj_argus: We have an issue open for this: https://github.com/pinballmap/pbm-react/issues/476. You can track our progress there if you’d like. We hope to work further on this really soon.
The short of it is that the iOS app has this feature, and we actually had it on Android for a bit. But there was a significant performance issue on Android when rendering those “custom markers.” The issue seems to be in the map package that we use in the app. So we have to find a functioning workaround for it. We have some things (noted in that issue) that we plan to try.