This version is a better expression for the way Zipalong really is. Solid and simple.
The logo comes to light together with other UI updates as a first step towards a more ‘organic’ look and feel of Zipalong.

This release has taken a bit longer than we expected, but we’ve added a major new feature:

• Groups. Start your own mini-community, or join others who share common interests. We’ve designed groups for flexibility, so it’s really up to you on how you want to use them

We now have a Simpler, nicer header. We are in the process of making Zipalong simpler and better looking, this is just the first step

Here’s what’s new:

• Facebook Connect. If you login via Facebook, your profile information
  and friends follow you automatically on Zipalong.
  
• Elevation profile. You can now see the elevation profile
  of your trip in the itinerary flyby.
  
• We’ve fixed a problem with the reported duration of land routes, now they should match the ones from Google.
• Many small improvements and fixes sprinkled throughout.

Welcome to our tutorial series on Trip creation, better known as “Everything you ever wanted to know about trip creation but were afraid to ask!”

Part 1 -The basics

In part 2 of the trip creation tutorial series, we demonstrate how to upload pictures, how to manage them once they are uploaded, and how to view them and share them with others.

Part 2 - Managing pictures

In part 3 of the trip creation tutorial series, we explore the intricacies of creating itineraries in full details

Part 3 - The itinerary

In part 4 of the trip creation tutorial series, we take a look at how to view an animation of the trips!

Part 4 - The animation player

In this fifth instalment of the Trip creation tutorial series, we’ll delve into the inner secrets of journal entries!

Part 5 - Journals and blogs

————————————————–

You need sound enabled on your system to listen to the tutorial.  The tutorials are best viewed if you maximize the browser window.

Badih

Planning a bike trip somewhere new but would like to check out various training routes in the area before selecting your hotel?  No problem!! For all cyclists, triathletes and runners (as well as anyone else who would find this useful ), we will soon be releasing the first version of an elevation profiler.  You will be able to create an itinerary and check out the elevation profile for your route!!

Badih

We were invited to Facebook Camp give a 5 minute presentation on our Facebook Connect implementation.

The event was organized by the folks at Refresh Partners, Roy Pereira and Colin Smillie. They put together a great event, I was impressed by how well it was put together (hey, I still remember how much work went into organizing my wedding ).

We’ve met a lot of fun folks as well, like Loren Norona from AppsSavvy, Faramarz Hashemi from Lookality, Natasha D’Souza from VirtualEyeSee, Majid Hashemi, Sina Amiri, and of course last but not least the organizers Roy and Colin.

The presentation on Facebook Connect was quite informative (Matt Wyndowe did a great job!), and it helped us see a lot more potential integration between Facebook and Zipalong. So expect a lot of cool stuff in this area in the next little while.

Here’s what’s new:

• Shares tracking and control. If you are an editor you can see who sent the shares, when, and even disable them if you need to. Non-editors can track only their own shares.
• Nicer, cleaner emails. We like our emails to be small, clean, and easy to read. We’ve put a lot of work into them, we hope you’ll like them too.
• Improvements in the registration process, not something that you care about once you signup on Zipalong
• Many small improvements and fixes all over the place

How do you get to track your shares?

Zipalong has a comprehensive and flexible privacy system that is simple and intuitive to use.

You can customize the privacy settings of your trips and pictures as much as you like. For example you can set your trips and pictures to be viewable only by your friends with one simple step.

What if you have a trip that you’re really proud of, and you want everybody to see it? Nothing simpler: just make that one trip public. You have some pictures in that trip that you want to keep private? Again, just set the picture privacy level of each picture to a level you feel comfortable with.

Good, but what if you want to show a trip to someone who is not your friend? Just send him or her a trip share. Can they request access to my private trip? Of course they can!

The nitty-gritty

So if you’re interested in the technical details of how all this works read on.

To understand privacy we need to explain a bit the hierarchy of the various entities used on Zipalong. The top most entity would be the user profile. The user profile contains one or more trips which in turn contain an itinerary, journals entries, and pictures. You can control the privacy setting at each of the three levels.

The profile privacy is accessible through the settings link on your home page. It has three levels:

• friends only - your profile can be accessed only by your friends
• members only - your profile can be accessed only by Zipalong members
• public - your profile is public, indexable by Google

The trip privacy is accessible on the trip cover tab, under the settings link. It has five levels:

• default - meaning it inherits your profile privacy setting
• participants - the trip can be viewed only by trip participants
• friends - the trip can be viewed only by your friends
• members - the trip can be viewed by all Zipalong members
• public - trip is public, indexable by Google

The picture privacy is available on the picture details bubble. It has six levels:

• default - meaning it inherits your trip level setting
• private - nobody but you can access this picture
• participants - the picture can be viewed only by trip participants
• friends - the picture can be viewed only by your friends
• members - the picture can be viewed by all Zipalong members
• public - picture is public, indexable by Google

It is key that the same hierarchy that we identified for the entities above applies for the privacy levels. Therefore, the profile privacy level will be inherited by the trip privacy level, and the trip privacy level will be inherited by the picture privacy level. So if you set the profile privacy level at friends only, automatically all your trips and pictures will only be available to your friends.

One more release aimed at stabilization and addressing user feedback.

Here’s what’s new:

• The system will now keep you updated if any of your friends join Zipalong. You’ll be notified via email.
• You can easily suggest friends to new users to help them get started (assuming you have common friends, of course…)
• Opera is fully supported browser now. We recommend version 9.6 or later. Please send feedback if you encounter any problem.
• We’ve added a slideshow link right in your newsfeed so you can easily get there when someone uploads pictures into a trip.
• The picture details dialog defaults now to the larger version of the picture. We’d like to hear from you if you think it’s too big for your screen.
• Some important speed optimizations in our relentless drive to an ever faster experience.
• By popular demand we’ve added a “Download All” link in the slideshow so you can download all pictures in one go. Look for it in the left-bottom corner of the screen, under Picture Details.
• Lots of other fixes and feedbacks made it in

The big happy news of course is that the team is one (super cute) baby stronger! Needless to say, we are all very excited. Maybe we’ll find out more from the happy parents…

For the last few days we decided to go back and address many feedbacks that were waiting in the wings. And we did such a good job, that we couldn’t wait to bring them online

Here’s what’s new:

• Nicer waypoints: when building land-route itineraries, we now handle waypoints a lot better than in the past. In particular, long drives are handled much soother. It took us a while to get it right, and we hope did. Let us know if you still discover problems with it.
• Improved newsfeed: there were several enhancements here, like displaying the pictures on which tags you suggested were declined, better handling of deleted or private pictures, showing the picture caption on hover, and so on.
• Speed improvements: the Share/Invite dialog has seen some dramatic improvements when you have to deal with large numbers of friends.
• Feedbacks: many were addresses, too many to list here.

We are already planning a new release in a few days to bring you another batch of improvements across the site, so stay tuned.