MapSherpa Launch – Early Feedback

MapSherpa launch day has come and gone — after all day 1 only happens once. With it has come some encouraging feedback. Other than a 10 minute hiatus where we pressed the wrong button leaving our database hung out to dry, the day went very smoothly. (Our apologies to anyone trying out MapSherpa between 10:40 and 10:50 AM Eastern on Monday!)

Of course we were particularly interested to hear your reactions, reviews, criticisms, and other food for thought. We weren’t disappointed – so here’s a quick summary of what we heard.

From the Mapping Community

Not too surprisingly, the mapping community was the first to take notice of MapSherpa. With the Press Releases hitting the ground on day 1, a lot of folks that had seen a lot of web mapping applications were curious to see what made MapSherpa different from all the others.

Adena Shutzberg from Directions Magazine put together a thoughtful post on where MapSherpa is positioned within the mapping industry and some historical context of the business roots of this service. Vector 1 Media provides another perspective on how MapSherpa is positioned within the Mapping industry.

Anygeo was impressed with the user friendliness of MapSherpa. Glenn and I had a couple of email exchanges where he expressed some thoughts around how useful sharing a map would be within the app. We agree .. we just need some time to make it happen.

From the Technical Community

DM Solutions Group, the company behind MapSherpa has long roots and remains highly active in the open source world. MapServer, OpenLayers, and JxLib (originally developed by DM) all perform critical functions within MapSherpa’s infrastructure. Because of the company’s relationship to open source – it didn’t take too long to get some feedback even while we were in beta:

very slick UI

best UI ever in JS – JX

Thanks!

and my favourite from a tweet:

looking for #mapsherpa.com service for #maps of #UK and #climbing and dreaming about @mapsherpa for Poland (in 50 yrs? I doubt )

Hmmm Poland – well probably not next on our list, but no reason not to dream.

From the Outdoor Recreation Community

Since we expect that the service will find most utility within the outdoor recreation community in Canada, we were most interested to hear what people had to say after their first impressions.

Hey there. I was playing with the maps. It’s a very slick system. Congrats on developing a very good user interface. Not many can pull it off well.

Along with that email exchange came a report of a strange issue with getting less detail on a final output for certain maps then what is seen on screen … oops, sure enough we uncovered a bug. :S We know we have some issues hanging around so please let us know what you find so we can fix them. The best way to let us know is by posting a quick note through our support page.

And today we had some feedback from a blogger at Explore Magazine that we were recently in touch with. Nice work btw Kevin – looks like you put our tools to work!

From the … Hmmm not sure what to call this Community

And of course – launch wouldn’t be launch without something outside the ordinary … who knew that on launch day I would learn so much about my family heritage!

So thank you everyone for making our launch a success. If you have any feedback on this blog entry or anything else — please provide your comments on our support page. Until we have comments enabled on this blog – I’ll post any comments folks may have about this entry back to our readers.