Reid Beels

I’ve been using Plazes for a while now to track my location as I wander around with my laptop. The concept is really cool. They have a desktop client that figures out your location based on a database of network ids and such. If it doesn’t know about the place where you are, it asks you, and the information is added for anyone else who visits that place.Earlier today, the client asked to be upgraded and I obliged. Moments later, the new interface appeared. The first thing that I noticed was that the window was slightly transparent. There’s no real reason for transparency here, so it struck me as another casualty of Apple making certain UI effects at bit too easy.The interface has been simplified (a lot) from past incarnations of the client, which I see as a good thing. Instead of displaying every possible informational field about a plaze, it now simply shows the name and address of your current location. It seems that the neat little map that used to show up in the client menu has gone away, but it was never all that useful anyway since it was at a pretty wide zoom.Overall, the new interface itself struck me as a bit too web-like for a desktop app.  I’m not entirely against the web-on-desktop thing, but slapping a logo banner across the top of the preferences window seems to be taking it a bit too far. Another interface change that irks me is the fact that the client no longer offers the option to hide its dock icon and that its main window opens automatically on startup. One of the things that I love(d) about plazes was that I didn’t ever have to pay attention to it. The client ran in the background and updated my location whenever I connected to a network. Now, it seems intent on demanding more interaction.This demand seems possibly to be linked to a new field that now appears below the location information. “What are you doing?” it asks. Hmmmm. The combination of status with location is not a bad idea, but it just gives me one more place to update my status information. If Plazes would pull my status information from Twitter and sync it with my location, that would be ideal. I recognize that the two services are competing, and that plazes offers both status and location, but I don’t have any contacts who are actively using plazes for status stuff.Another vanished bit of functionality seems to be Plazes’ tight integration with flickr. It showed up in the days before flickr’s own geocoding feature and allowed you to assign photos to plazes that you had visited.  Since most of my photos are already on flickr, this made it incredibly easy to add photos to plazes as I edited them. Once a photo was associated with a plaze, it would show up as that plaze’s icon. In the new version of the site, photos are still possible, but they have to be uploaded directly to Plazes’ servers. A side effect of this is all of the photos that I spent time linking from flickr to my plazes no longer appear. Poot.Despite these (and a few other) annoyances, I’m still hopeful for Plazes. This is a huge upgrade that they’re pushing out and it makes great strides towards becoming simple enough for the average user to understand. With something this large, It’s completely understandable that there would be bugs that emerge and sacrifices that had to be made. I just hope that the features that brought me to plazes in the first place manage to come back in the coming weeks.