Places, Votes, and Comments

I see places, votes, and comments mentioned a lot - what are those?

Places are just shapes on the map. They can be markers, lines, or free-form shapes. We come from a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) background but we're hoping to conceptualize spatial data in a slightly more web-friendly way.

Votes allow you to up and down-vote places within a collection, so you can keep track of the consensus of a group, for instance.

Comments are responses about a given place, similar to any other web comment board, except with a focus on a particular place.

Collections

I hear the word collection mentioned a lot - what's that?

Collections are a way to organize your places into groups which have a common theme. A number of concepts are tied to collections including permissions, theming of how places appear both in the sidebar and on the map, and a few others things we'll get to later. Collections are similar to a "board" in Pinterest or a "layer" in GIS.

One key feature of TM is to store many collections in the same system and to be able to search across collections - for instance, to find all the places near you, no matter the collection they are a part of.

Nonetheless, a great many use cases involve collecting place data within a single collection, and we will make sure to provide access to that functionality in the simplest way we can without complicating things with the greater possibilities provided by TM.

Getting Started

So, what's the best way to get started?

My favorite basic use case is to collect places I want to remember - e.g. a set of coffee shops I might want to go to. So let's assume you and a few friends want to build a collection of the best coffee shops for working in San Francisco.

• First move the map to San Francisco (or to wherever you are) by searching for a nearby location using the magnifying glass button on the map (similar to what you would do with Google Maps), or just drag the map to your preferred location.

• Next make a new collection by opening the side menu (using the triple bars, called the "Hamburger") and "New". This creates a new collection with the default name, which you can change to "Fave Coffee" or something similar. You can also move the map around a bit to your preferred default view for this collection and click the "default view" button (the triangle rotated to the right) to save the current map as the default view. Click the left arrow to go back to the collection page for this collection. In TM everything is saved automatically as you change things (so be sure to change it back if you didn't intend the change).

• Next add places to the map using the "draw" tool in the lower left hand corner. Click on the small button that is 3rd from the bottom (the one that looks like a marker). This is the "add marker" button. Once you click you will have a marker attached to the cursor and you can move this marker to any location on the map and click to drop the marker. This will take you to the "place edit" page where you can change the name and add a description of this coffee shop, or maybe add a photo. Continue adding places until you have several coffee shops, and keep in mind that you can share this map with others and they can contibute to build a map of yo

  On mobile this is even easier, but a little bit different. See "Adding Places on Mobile" under "The Basics."