Building a Map

A FriendTrack Map is an image of a real place — a piste map, a festival site plan, a floor plan — tied to the real world tightly enough that a phone standing in that place can be drawn in the right spot on it. You make one in the Map Editor, in a browser, signing in with the same phone number you use in the app.

This is procedural work and it is unforgiving in one specific place: calibration. Everything else is fast. If you read one thing before starting, read what you need before you start — the job is much easier if you gather the coordinates first.

Orientation

What a Map is, the whole arc on one page, what to have ready, and how to get in.

Making a map

Choosing an image that will calibrate well, uploading it, and naming it.

Calibration and Anchor Points

The step that decides whether your map is any good. An Anchor Point ties one spot on your image to one pair of real-world coordinates; three of them are the minimum, and more of them are how you find out whether the three were right.

Areas of Interest

The named parts of your venue — a stage, a lift queue, a bar, a car park. They are what a friend’s position gets described in terms of, and what an arrival notification names.

Publishing and Map Versions

Keeping a map to yourself or listing it in the catalog, what review looks for, and the one rule every map creator meets exactly once: a published map cannot be edited.

Working with other people

Letting a colleague edit, letting your own Group use something you have not published, building on somebody else’s map, and maps that belong to a venue rather than to a person.

Using the app is a different job

Everything about the phone app — Groups, Sharing, notifications, your account — is in its own set of pages: Using FriendTrack.