What's new with MapSwipe

01 August 2016

Get the latest MapSwipe update and you will find a whole load of improvements!

Following the excellent feedback so many of you sent us, our team has been hard at work to get the next MapSwipe update out.

The biggest challenge was that of repeated imagery. Previously, you probably had suspicions that you were mapping the same areas over and over again. Unfortunately, you were right. This was due to a bug in the distribution algorithm and is now fixed. You should now be mapping in new areas every time you charge up the app! One sad consequence of this is that, while projects looked like they were finished, not all the areas within them had been mapped. As a result , you will notice that the completion rates on some missions on the homescreen have dropped significantly. Although this looks like a negative outcome, what it actrually means is that we will get through projects much faster now, as you guys cover a wider area more efficiently. So, keep mapping! Those percentages will fly up!

Some of you experienced perpetual loading screens in certain missions and this has also been fixed. However, if you do experience either repeated imagery or perpetual loading, we have added another button to each mission screen called Bugs? Clear project data. Hitting this button should reset your data for that particular mission, meaning these issues should no longer exist…

Guidance was flagged as lacking within MapSwipe. While most of you are enjoying the the usability of the app, many of you wanted more help understanding exactly what you were being asked to identify. You should now see a Tutorial button in each mission which will take you to this blog post. We will be working to improve the blog post itself over the next few days as well. Your feedback is always welcome to help us make this better.

New features

New features on the mission pages

Other than that, there are a few other small usability tweaks that should make your MapSwiping faster and smoother.

We hope that you enjoy these changes… We are still working on open sourcing the code via github and developing an exporter, so you can download and use the data as well as contributing to it. Watch this space for more news…

We would also like to provide MapSwipe information in languages other than English. If you’d like to contribute to this, there is a shared spreadsheet here. Please feel free to add the name of your language to the column header and translate the highlighted cells. We will add new languages into the app in the near future.

Your feedback and bug reports are still more than welcome, via the feedback form or github.

Thank you all for helping us make MapSwipe fly! We are so pleased that so many of you are choosing to help humaniatarian organisations by MapSwiping the areas in which they are providing for vulnerable communities. Keep up the great work!


by Pete Masters