March 9, 2009

So I spent a little time this weekend giving the mobile site some love. The mobile site was built over Thanksgiving weekend as my first venture into building an iPhone-friendly adaptation of a web app. It turned out alright and I learned a lot my doing it. Since then I've been using the mobile site as my "on-the-go" event reference and it has worked well for the most part. I've also been keeping a list of small things that bugged me or didn't quite feel right and I managed to address most of them in this update. A few items of note include a refined tab navigation, a new "day select" menu for the calendar, artist info displayed in event lists, larger type and bigger buttons overall.

And now on to the most exciting new feature! Previously there were two ways to explore events - by day and by recently added. Now there's a new way to find events that is really exciting, useful and currently does not exist on the regular website - find current events near you. There is a simple form to enter your location and hit "search" to get results. "Your location" can be as specific as a street address or as general as a zip code (or even city). You will then see a list of all the venues within 2 miles of the original location along with any current events for each. You can click on a venue name to see more info about that venue, click on an event to learn more about that specific event and there is a button at the bottom to get the next set of closest results.

It's all a little rough and there's not much control over the search parameters or results display, but I didn't think all that was necessary right now. I'd like to live with it for a while and see how it feels and hear what other people think about it. This is another one of those ideas I thought about when first starting the site over a year ago, but never knew if I would get to or be able to figure out of my own so this is a particularly exciting update. I have also been thinking about a bigger update to the map options and display on the regular site which could now also include a proximity search as part of it.

Try it out and see if it works for you. Have any ideas or suggestion? Use the contact form. Then tell your friends about the best arts events calendar in SF... Boo-yah!

Posted by Lucas at 4:30pm