noyainrain
Provide geo URI for locations
Make it possible to open locations with location-aware apps, e.g. for navigation, via geo URI.
We still need to determine how to best represent this in the UI. Some ideas:
- Location is a geo link, with an additional map marker link / button
- Location is a map marker link, with an additional geo link / button
- Map marker opens a popup with item and geo links / buttons
- ...
Thanks for the suggestion @dnnr.
I'd go with the first solution, for this reason: A small "(show on map)" anchor next to the location is easily understandable without much further explanation. I think that for the alternative (your 2nd variant), a meaningful anchor label is much harder to find: "(open geo link)"? "external link"? "open in another app"? Rather not. :-1:
Another potential reason: You might, at some point in the future, want to allow hiding the map via the list settings. With the 1st variant, you could then easily hide the "show on map" link as well. In other words, the geo link feels much more mandatory (as in: it is always appropriate to have it) than the ability to show the location on the map.
Thanks for your feedback! :)
I find your arguments quite convincing. I played around with the proposed solution a bit, but stumbled upon another hurdle, unfortunately :/ .
Geo URIs are (almost) only supported on Android, not on iOS and Desktop. For example, opening the link in Firefox Desktop will result in the following error:
I imagine for a good part of users such an error message will not make sense (if they just clicked on the link to find out where it leads). It may seem like Listling is failing here.
My first approach would be to feature detect Geo URI support, but this seems not to be possible (without user agent sniffing, which I would be hesitant to employ) (more research might be necessary here):
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19787100/detecting-geo-uri-support
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11747570/geo-protocol-on-iphone-safari
I think if the user has the intent to open an external app, they will be more likely to make sense of the browser error message. Thus, this situation might be better handled by the second solution (location is map marker link with additional geo link / button), even if it is not ideal in general :/ .
Any thoughts? :)
PS: I think it would be good to see how other web apps handle this, unfortunately I have only found examples that link to Google Maps.