Frappr Maps

Frappr Maps IS a joke, isn't it? There are a few places that I want to visit, and I thought I'd keep a handy collection of them together in one place. I've vaguely used Frappr in the past, so I thought it looked like a good place to set something up.

Now, I may well be wrong here, but I'd have thought the easiest way to do something like this would be one of two ways. You either type in the address of the place you want to add a tag for, and the system will then locate it on a map for you, and give you some opportunity to agree/disagree with the place you've got, or you can go straight to the map, find the place you're interested in, then add it in.

Not apparently with Frappr. Oh no. I decide that I want to add in Coulsdon, so I click on 'Add place'. Then I get some whiney noise to tell me I've done something wrong. Apparently I should have entered a place name first. So I do that. Then I add in Coulsdon again, then click on 'Add Place!' Long pause before I get the whiney noise again, with the error 'Sorry, we could not understand your location'.  Let's try again then with Coulsdon, England, United Kingdom. Success! Place added.
Except for two things. Firstly, the placemarker in slap bang in Central London, not South West London, the way it should be. Secondly, the little markers disappear, so I can't find it again even if I want to.

Now, I'm reasonably intelligent, so let me try and work my way out of this situation. Is there a 'help' screen? No. Great. There's an edit option on the map itself. Does that do anything? No. (When I've managed to get it to do something previously the options given are a waste of space). Ah ha! Umpteenth time of trying I get the option to edit the group map. I can set the Center, which apparently allows me to move a marker. That's not the most logical thing I've ever seen, but never mind. Oh no, I take it back, it doesn't let me do that at all. Hang on, I take it back. (I'm sorry for all this, really I am.. but if it's irritating for you, just think what it's like for me!).

I click elsewhere on the map, and finally get to move my marker to the place it should be in the first place. I also get Longitude and Latitude options, which are great if you know what they are, or need to know, but I just want to put a little marker onto a map for Gods sake! How hard do these people want to make it for me? So, having sorted that, we click on 'Use this location' and then, Save Settings. Then we have to close the dialogue window. Clearly it's not intelligent enough to work out that when I click on 'save settings' I'm done and finished.

Has this actually made any difference at all? No, not a bit. That's another few minutes of my life wasted. Oh, here's an interesting thing. Don't put anything onto the 'Add Place' option, just click straight on [Advanced]. This pops up another dialogue box "type in a location and press Update" So we try 'Coulsdon' again. No luck. Adding in 'England, United Kingdom' actually gets me to the right country, which is the good news. The bad news is that we're still way off target. The good news is that I can actually click and drag to the place that I want to put my marker. Yes! We've finally managed it. Praise be.

I now get told that I've got 5 places on my map. I did add one earlier, so I should have 2. Or, even if I made a mess once, 3. But no, I have 5. So I go into Settings, Edit Places and delete the ones that I don't want. Except that they're all (with the exception of my first place) all saying the same place/location. All are wrong, with the exception of one. I can't go and look however, so it's a question of playing Russian Roulette to see if I can get the wrong ones deleted. Hurrah! I get it right. I now have 2 nice little markers, but my little dialogue box is telling me that I have 3 places listed. Zoom in, Zoom out, nope.. 2 little markers, not 3.

So, congratulations Frappr, I've just spent the last 45 minutes of my life trying to work out how your system works. And it stinks. And no, I don't actually care that you've got lots of happy users who can figure out how this rats maze of a thing is configured - I can't. It's not logical, it's not intuitive, it's not sensible. Dire, utterly Dire.

If anyone knows of a mapping system that will let me add in places quickly, simply, without any fuss please let me know, because I don't want to go through this again.

Comments

[iandavid]

Try Flagr (http://www.flagr.com) or Platial (http://www.platial.com).

[Owen Stephens and Damyanti Patel]

I tried Frappr recently and also found it pretty hard going. The interface is far too busy, it seems to bleep at me when I do anything. Probably the worse thing I found was if you use the 'chat' function. When someone joins the chat, you can click on them to see their profile - this immediately removes you from the chat room!

I know it's 'beta' but I just can't see the point of struggling with this - perhaps I'm just getting old.