Hello guys,
I would like to address most of the issues or suggestions you have mentioned here.
A common thing mentioned by all of you has been a wasted space on the top of mobile web page. This is a valid suggestion and we will talk with the web page designer about this and about improving the mobile UI experience generally.
As for mentioned control of the time the user is visible on the map - we have just added this functionality. It can be set by the owner of the group in the group settings globally for the whole group. Public group session time remained to be set to 10 minutes. Also some indication of how fresh the position is mentioned by lor74cas is also something we think would be useful, but is not implemented yet.
@lor74cas
Thank you for noticing that user data do not seem to be update at all in the recent version, that is definitely a bug.
Adding some other user data including battery is a good idea, we would probably also need some sensible way of showing the data values if their number increases, definitely something to think about.
@tapio
Live chat is currently not available through web interface, it is something we would like to implement some time later.
GPX is currently not generated by the live tracking server but we would like to have some kind of online track recording feature or maybe integrate track recording and live tracking together somehow to be able to share live tracking track.
For POIs, hints, comments etc. the Live chat should be used, but this option is currently missing from the web interface as stated previously.
Automatic zooming to the user after they are selected is really weird at the moment, you have described it quite precisely as fighting against the web interface. We will talk with the web designer to disable this zooming function completely and leave only centering to the user's position enabled.
Also regarding your problems of users not showing on the map, there were actually two possible causes of this. First there was a bug, which led to the positions not showing when the group user (session) timeout was set to indefinite, but that should be fixed since yesterday. Secondly there is a problem if the user icon's URL is invalid and then it does not show on the map. This still needs to be fixed. In the meantime try refreshing your avatar in Live Tracking profile or selecting one of the Locus Icons instead, which should work correctly.
@Andrew Heard
Thank you for the suggestions, most of the are good tips but we will focus on more pressing UX issues, as the web page obviously needs an update after the first release.
As for the user counts in the group/cluster not adding up; I think that the number was actually correct but some of the people had incorectly set icon URL (we had some issues with Google changing avatar URLs recently) and so one of the people was invisible when zoomed in to show the icon. We will try to fix the issue.
As for supported date/time format - the web should be using default for your device's locale. There should be no need to set it anywhere. Is format MM/DD/YYYY unusual for your locale? Other units are displayed using metric system only at the moment, which might also be confusing for some people unfortunately.
Anyway thank all of you for all the suggestions and feedback, it really helps us to pinpoint potential problems of lacking features of the new interface.