Turn-by-turn walking mode arrives
This was the week the walking app stopped being a map with pins on it and started being something you could actually walk with your phone in your pocket. Four increments landed back to back — compass, geofence, notice board, narration — and by Friday the app was in Apple’s hands for App Review.
For walkers: the app finds its voice
The core of walking mode is simple to describe and was genuinely hard to build: the app now knows where you are relative to the story, not just relative to the map. A redesigned compass tracks your heading in real time, a 30-metre geofence around each waypoint detects when you’ve actually arrived (not just when you’ve glanced at the pin), and arrival opens automatically — no fumbling for a button while you’re still walking.
Once you’re there, the “notice board” does the telling: a photo gallery for the waypoint, the story of the approach — what happened on the walk toward this spot, not just what happened at it — and, new this week, on-device audio narration that reads it to you. Photo credit and attribution show up right where the photo does, because the person who found or took that photograph deserves the byline. And the route line on the map now hugs real streets instead of cutting a straight line across blocks that don’t have footpaths.
Individually these are small, fiddly pieces of UX. Together they’re the difference between “an app about a place” and “a companion for the walk” — which was always the point: families out on a Saturday afternoon, phone in a pocket, glancing at it only when it has something worth saying.
And the biggest line of the week isn’t a feature at all: Story Trail Walk was submitted for Apple App Review. Screenshots of the shipped walking experience will start appearing in this log from the next build onward.
For historians: better raw material to work with
None of the above works without something worth walking toward, and the historian side of the house spent the week giving trail-builders sharper tools for exactly that. Waypoints can now carry an approach story — the narrative beat for the walk between stops, not just the stop itself — which is what powers the walker app’s new notice board. Photo galleries went from one image per waypoint to several, each with proper attribution, and a new “find related” reverse image search helps a historian track down where a photo actually came from before publishing it under someone else’s name by mistake.
Building a trail also got more forgiving to actually walk while you’re building it: routes between waypoints are now calculated on real streets, with a warning if the path doubles back on itself — the kind of thing you only notice the third time you’ve walked past the same corner. And waypoint reordering in the historian tool now pushes straight through to the published trail, instead of silently drifting out of sync.
Under the hood
A handful of fixes that don’t make for exciting screenshots but matter for a tool people are trusting with real research: a stale-auth-token retry so an expired session shows a clear message instead of a bare “Forbidden,” a corrected Flickr license mapping so photo attribution actually says what it should, a fix for a multi-second lag between dragging a waypoint and its geofence circle catching up, and a /api/health endpoint that now reports exactly which commit is live in production.
A note on this log: this is the first entry, written by hand while the weekly process gets wired up. From here it’s generated automatically once a week from what actually shipped across Story Trail’s four repositories — including screenshots from real app testing, and the TestFlight build number, whenever that week’s commits touch something visible.