A public thank-you to the numerous people who have been in touch regarding possible download or purchase of the Puffbox NewsMap app. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it on his blog on Friday, and since then we’ve had a steady flow of people looking at our ‘about’ page, and feeling like they’d like to know more. It’s genuinely flattering (as is being mentioned in the same post as Mr Holovaty).
The app was never really intended to ‘go global’, but it’s becoming obvious that there’s a demand for something like this. We’ll need a little while to fine-tune what we’ve done, and make it easier to install and set up on systems we aren’t already familiar with. Plus we’ll need to think about nasty things like licensing and commercials. We’re also experimenting with a potential new ‘polygon creator’ feature… but we’re not necessarily sure it’s a useful addition. (Would you want it? If so, let me know.)
By the way, if you’re interested in the app and you haven’t seen the explanatory page on Puffbox.com, have a look. It’s got a new visual showing the page in Puffbox branding, and showing the ‘sidebar’ functionality which Sky (so far) haven’t implemented.
Responses
Really interesting application, and I’d like to see more about it. I’d like to see how it compares with Atlas (www.fmatlas.com), a free front-end for the Google Maps that is simple to use, allows user contributions and – oh, did I mention it’s free – also aimed at the journalist crowd and been in use since October of last year, at least.
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