October 4, 2023 • 10 mins
Have you ever wondered how a map raster product could morph into an app that aids explorers Australia-wide? Join us as we unpack the fascinating journey of the ExplorOz Traveller App, from its humble beginnings to its current version. The early years were fraught with numerous challenges due to limited device storage space. Yet, we persevered, packing this app with features galore, without compromising the device's performance. Our commitment to user feedback played a critical role, in helping us shape a user management system that made the app accessible and useful for all.
Today's episode also encompasses the app's transition from its roots in the EOTopo 2019 raster map product to its advanced Vector version. User feedback, as always, was instrumental in shaping this growth, influencing the unique features the app boasts today. Our grappling journey with diverse devices and platforms, and the adventure of designing an adaptable and user-friendly system are all on the table. So, buckle up, subscribe and join us on this captivating journey through the intriguing technicalities of mapping and navigation in the ExplorOz Traveller App.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, welcome back to our podcast, and in this
episode we're going to touch onthe early years of the Explorers
Traveler app, from basicallywhen we started it until
possibly halfway through itslifespan.
One of the things that wementioned in our previous
podcast was you know, themapping and the data that we
(00:20):
were able to have access to wasall this rasterized format for
the maps.
And now, whether you know whatthat means or not, basically, a
raster is basically a picture.
It's a static image and youknow you can't.
If you bring it closer or takeit further away for zoom in, you
don't get any more detail.
It basically just has the samelevel of detail, just whether
(00:42):
it's clear and crisp or whetheryou know you move it away, it
gets out of focus or more focal.
So a raster map product waswhere we basically started the
Explorers Traveler app.
We'd come across, we'd beendoing the EO Topo map set as a
raster release for, you know,the Aussie Explorer users, some
other users, memory map and afew other mapping programs that
(01:03):
were out there at the time coulduse our maps, use these raster
maps that we put out in adifferent file format to support
those mapping products.
So when we started with theExplorers Traveler development.
We basically started with whatwe knew.
So we started with therasterized map product.
So we were basically working onbeing able to deliver our
(01:27):
raster map products in anoffline capacity so that you
could basically take our rastermaps with you offline and use
them anywhere, coupled with ourplus places database and some
treks and some other bits andpieces that we thought were
essential items to have whenyou're traveling, and like a lot
of things.
You know, we were born from ourexperiences with Aussie
(01:49):
Explorer over the years sittingin the car saying I wish it had
or I wish we had, I wish wecould do, I wish we could do.
And so over the first year ortwo of app development, it was
all about putting in those wishwe could do things into the app
and building it so that we coulduse it.
We were obviously restrictedwith certain things that we
(02:11):
wanted to do.
You know the file sizes for theraster images.
We could create what was calledmore zoom levels by creating
more raster images.
But by creating more rasterimages we needed more file
storage, you know.
So there becomes a point in allof these devices where you're
starting to ask for too muchstorage, or user experience or
(02:33):
user perception oh, you needfive gigs of storage.
Way back then, 10 or 15 yearsago, five gigs of storage was
more than a lot of these deviceshad.
So whilst we were comingthrough with our developments,
we were obviously mindful of therestrictions and things that
were available in the devicesthat could go offline and use
your maps and the products thatwe created.
(02:53):
So for a lot of years we weresort of trying to cram all these
wonderful features that wedreamed of for years and years
as we traveled around into aproduct that you know where.
We just were limited to a scope.
We couldn't make it doeverything that we wanted to do.
So you know, there was a numberof years of development taking
(03:14):
user feedback.
One of the big things that someof our listeners may not be
aware of is that we are drivenby our user feedback.
So, basically, other than ourown well geez, it would be nice
to have this in the app.
Most of the features andfunctions that are available in
the app have all come in fromuser generated feedback that we
(03:34):
take really seriously, and a lotof the time we implement the
things that are after us.
Do you have any sort of partsto add to the journey of
creating the app.
You know, getting it where youhad the raster, and we went down
a certain path.
Obviously, we got to a pointwhere we had more access to data
and vector storage and I thinkwe'll talk about the vector and
(03:54):
the later stuff in anotherpodcast.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I think that the biggest thing that we had to
contend with is that suddenlypeople have got either an
Android device or they've got anApple device.
But they're different or aWindows device, but they're very
different.
Not all devices were the same,and so for us, as a developer,
you know we were going throughan evolution with our
capabilities as well.
(04:18):
So, you know, does do mostpeople use it in portrait?
Do they use it in landscape?
Do they use more phones or dothey use more, more the tablet?
Then there's people wantingthem on their, their head units,
and, you know, nowadays it'scarplay, but in those days it
wasn't so much, and just tryingto make sure that we could have
one program that we could beworking on and developing and
(04:41):
maintaining, that was had thesynergy across all those
different variables so that itwould automatically look the
same on all those devices andyou could tilt it portrait, you
could tilt it landscape, andthen, of course, there's all the
user management.
So we have a lot of people thatyou know it's a husband and
wife traveling.
Do they have to pay for the apptwice?
(05:01):
No, do they need to have twodifferent accounts?
No, so there's a lot of allthat behind the scenes.
And why have?
Why have an account?
You know, early on with digitalproducts, some people had an
objection to actually puttingtheir email address in and
letting a company, have youremail address.
But from the point of view ofmaking all this really cool
(05:24):
interactive stuff work and bereally user friendly to you so
that you can mark a place thatyou want to go in the future
that someone's told you about,well, how's it going to remember
that three months down thetrack on your next device or
your phone?
So just trying to take some ofthat feedback of user wishlist
and making that possible iswhere a lot of all that think
(05:45):
tanking went on for the earlyyears.
So early adopters of the appwere very instrumental in giving
that feedback to us as theyused it.
Those early adopters most ofthem are still on board and I
still talk to them today.
And you know it's fantastic toknow that it's evolved through
the hands of the people, becausethat's something that explorers
(06:07):
was always about.
When it was just a website, itwas, you know, providing
services that people actuallygenuinely wanted, and being able
to communicate with them and beavailable to them is something
that's always been reallyimportant to us.
So even with our service needstoday where, hands on, if you
contact our business, you'retalking directly to me or to
(06:28):
David and that's something thatis important.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Well, okay, I'm the gatekeeper.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
That's the truth of it, isn't it?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Everyone knows.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I always say you're going to contact Michelle and
David, but it's usually me again.
That's the truth.
But yeah, so that's probably myinput.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And so one of the things that is also really
crucial and pivotal in ourbusiness operations is that we
don't have a team of developersand we don't have a team of
admin and support staff.
Yeah, we're it and the buckstops here and there isn't
anywhere else really to go.
(07:05):
Obviously, during the lifecycle explorers, we've had up to
five or six staff and we'vedone various bits and pieces,
but you know business pressuresand where we wanted to take our
business and our products, wewanted to keep it, you know,
within ourselves and within thecapabilities of ourselves.
And the Explorers Travel Wrapwas my first app and the
(07:26):
Explorers website was my firstcommercial website, you know.
So we're not experts at any ofthis by a long stretch.
So it did take us a few years ofdevelopment of the app to bring
it along to a point where westarted to get more happy with
it.
We'd go out in the field andwe'd touch bases, people out
there using it and get theirfeedback again for additional
(07:48):
development and things to be putinto the app.
But it was really.
It's really inspirational andreally wonderful to go out or to
get feedback from users thatsay, oh, we love the app, it
does everything we want.
You know there's got featuresin here we've never seen in
anything else.
Where did you come up with someof this stuff?
And the answer is you know userexperience or our experience of
(08:08):
things that we think wereimportant and necessary to have
in the product.
And so, you know, for thoseyears of getting to that point
realistically, at a point wherewe were not really aware of what
we were doing, we'd go aroundabout the Eotopo 2019 and sort
of mid versions, Just after wethe last.
Eotopo 2019 was the last of ourRasta products.
(08:30):
You know, just as that wascoming to fruition and getting
to the end of its update cycle,we were getting all this great
feedback and we'd realized thatmoving it forward even further,
moving and getting better mapsand getting better data
presentation and more featuresto the users, was something that
was really important.
I think we'll discuss some ofthose in our next and upcoming
(08:55):
session where we look at, youknow, the technicalities and the
bits and pieces of theExplorers travel app that make
it unique and where it is today.
So make sure you subscribe andcatch up with us on the next one
.
Bye.
Okay, welcome back to our podcast, and in this
episode we're going to touch onthe early years of the Explorers
Traveler app, from basicallywhen we started it until
possibly halfway through itslifespan.
One of the things that wementioned in our previous
podcast was you know, themapping and the data that we
(00:20):
were able to have access to wasall this rasterized format for
the maps.
And now, whether you know whatthat means or not, basically, a
raster is basically a picture.
It's a static image and youknow you can't.
If you bring it closer or takeit further away for zoom in, you
don't get any more detail.
It basically just has the samelevel of detail, just whether
(00:42):
it's clear and crisp or whetheryou know you move it away, it
gets out of focus or more focal.
So a raster map product waswhere we basically started the
Explorers Traveler app.
We'd come across, we'd beendoing the EO Topo map set as a
raster release for, you know,the Aussie Explorer users, some
other users, memory map and afew other mapping programs that
(01:03):
were out there at the time coulduse our maps, use these raster
maps that we put out in adifferent file format to support
those mapping products.
So when we started with theExplorers Traveler development.
We basically started with whatwe knew.
So we started with therasterized map product.
So we were basically working onbeing able to deliver our
(01:27):
raster map products in anoffline capacity so that you
could basically take our rastermaps with you offline and use
them anywhere, coupled with ourplus places database and some
treks and some other bits andpieces that we thought were
essential items to have whenyou're traveling, and like a lot
of things.
You know, we were born from ourexperiences with Aussie
(01:49):
Explorer over the years sittingin the car saying I wish it had
or I wish we had, I wish wecould do, I wish we could do.
And so over the first year ortwo of app development, it was
all about putting in those wishwe could do things into the app
and building it so that we coulduse it.
We were obviously restrictedwith certain things that we
(02:11):
wanted to do.
You know the file sizes for theraster images.
We could create what was calledmore zoom levels by creating
more raster images.
But by creating more rasterimages we needed more file
storage, you know.
So there becomes a point in allof these devices where you're
starting to ask for too muchstorage, or user experience or
(02:33):
user perception oh, you needfive gigs of storage.
Way back then, 10 or 15 yearsago, five gigs of storage was
more than a lot of these deviceshad.
So whilst we were comingthrough with our developments,
we were obviously mindful of therestrictions and things that
were available in the devicesthat could go offline and use
your maps and the products thatwe created.
(02:53):
So for a lot of years we weresort of trying to cram all these
wonderful features that wedreamed of for years and years
as we traveled around into aproduct that you know where.
We just were limited to a scope.
We couldn't make it doeverything that we wanted to do.
So you know, there was a numberof years of development taking
(03:14):
user feedback.
One of the big things that someof our listeners may not be
aware of is that we are drivenby our user feedback.
So, basically, other than ourown well geez, it would be nice
to have this in the app.
Most of the features andfunctions that are available in
the app have all come in fromuser generated feedback that we
(03:34):
take really seriously, and a lotof the time we implement the
things that are after us.
Do you have any sort of partsto add to the journey of
creating the app.
You know, getting it where youhad the raster, and we went down
a certain path.
Obviously, we got to a pointwhere we had more access to data
and vector storage and I thinkwe'll talk about the vector and
(03:54):
the later stuff in anotherpodcast.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I think that the biggest thing that we had to
contend with is that suddenlypeople have got either an
Android device or they've got anApple device.
But they're different or aWindows device, but they're very
different.
Not all devices were the same,and so for us, as a developer,
you know we were going throughan evolution with our
capabilities as well.
(04:18):
So, you know, does do mostpeople use it in portrait?
Do they use it in landscape?
Do they use more phones or dothey use more, more the tablet?
Then there's people wantingthem on their, their head units,
and, you know, nowadays it'scarplay, but in those days it
wasn't so much, and just tryingto make sure that we could have
one program that we could beworking on and developing and
(04:41):
maintaining, that was had thesynergy across all those
different variables so that itwould automatically look the
same on all those devices andyou could tilt it portrait, you
could tilt it landscape, andthen, of course, there's all the
user management.
So we have a lot of people thatyou know it's a husband and
wife traveling.
Do they have to pay for the apptwice?
(05:01):
No, do they need to have twodifferent accounts?
No, so there's a lot of allthat behind the scenes.
And why have?
Why have an account?
You know, early on with digitalproducts, some people had an
objection to actually puttingtheir email address in and
letting a company, have youremail address.
But from the point of view ofmaking all this really cool
(05:24):
interactive stuff work and bereally user friendly to you so
that you can mark a place thatyou want to go in the future
that someone's told you about,well, how's it going to remember
that three months down thetrack on your next device or
your phone?
So just trying to take some ofthat feedback of user wishlist
and making that possible iswhere a lot of all that think
(05:45):
tanking went on for the earlyyears.
So early adopters of the appwere very instrumental in giving
that feedback to us as theyused it.
Those early adopters most ofthem are still on board and I
still talk to them today.
And you know it's fantastic toknow that it's evolved through
the hands of the people, becausethat's something that explorers
(06:07):
was always about.
When it was just a website, itwas, you know, providing
services that people actuallygenuinely wanted, and being able
to communicate with them and beavailable to them is something
that's always been reallyimportant to us.
So even with our service needstoday where, hands on, if you
contact our business, you'retalking directly to me or to
(06:28):
David and that's something thatis important.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Well, okay, I'm the gatekeeper.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
That's the truth of it, isn't it?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Everyone knows.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I always say you're going to contact Michelle and
David, but it's usually me again.
That's the truth.
But yeah, so that's probably myinput.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And so one of the things that is also really
crucial and pivotal in ourbusiness operations is that we
don't have a team of developersand we don't have a team of
admin and support staff.
Yeah, we're it and the buckstops here and there isn't
anywhere else really to go.
(07:05):
Obviously, during the lifecycle explorers, we've had up to
five or six staff and we'vedone various bits and pieces,
but you know business pressuresand where we wanted to take our
business and our products, wewanted to keep it, you know,
within ourselves and within thecapabilities of ourselves.
And the Explorers Travel Wrapwas my first app and the
(07:26):
Explorers website was my firstcommercial website, you know.
So we're not experts at any ofthis by a long stretch.
So it did take us a few years ofdevelopment of the app to bring
it along to a point where westarted to get more happy with
it.
We'd go out in the field andwe'd touch bases, people out
there using it and get theirfeedback again for additional
(07:48):
development and things to be putinto the app.
But it was really.
It's really inspirational andreally wonderful to go out or to
get feedback from users thatsay, oh, we love the app, it
does everything we want.
You know there's got featuresin here we've never seen in
anything else.
Where did you come up with someof this stuff?
And the answer is you know userexperience or our experience of
(08:08):
things that we think wereimportant and necessary to have
in the product.
And so, you know, for thoseyears of getting to that point
realistically, at a point wherewe were not really aware of what
we were doing, we'd go aroundabout the Eotopo 2019 and sort
of mid versions, Just after wethe last.
Eotopo 2019 was the last of ourRasta products.
(08:30):
You know, just as that wascoming to fruition and getting
to the end of its update cycle,we were getting all this great
feedback and we'd realized thatmoving it forward even further,
moving and getting better mapsand getting better data
presentation and more featuresto the users, was something that
was really important.
I think we'll discuss some ofthose in our next and upcoming
(08:55):
session where we look at, youknow, the technicalities and the
bits and pieces of theExplorers travel app that make
it unique and where it is today.
So make sure you subscribe andcatch up with us on the next one
.
Bye.
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