Better PWA support?

[gregsadetsky]

Hey,

Big fan of the site :-) I use it many times a week as I'm walking around New York, referencing my physical location with the photos from the map.

I'd love to have the site as a "quasi" app (i.e. using the "Add to Home Screen" functionality available in iOS Safari and Android) for a few reasons:

• easier access (just tap the app)
• support for geolocation (i.e. I could love if the map placed/showed me where I currently am)
• full screen UI (i.e. get a bit more real estate to see the map)

I think that some of these could be achieved with some relatively minor tweaks. Right now, when adding the site to the Home Screen (as a PWA i.e. Progressive Web App), the default icon & title are not really great:

I believe this can be fixed using some tags (see here; similar ones are available for Android as well) and a manifest.json file.

As for geolocation, I don't know if there'd be any interest from your part to add it; I'd be happy to prototype it. I generally have location services disabled for iOS Safari as a whole (just a general/privacy preference), but for this site, I'd enable it for sure. It should definitely be optional/respect if location services are not available at all (i.e. fail silently).

Cheers

[jboolean]

Hi @gregsadetsky. Thanks for the suggestion. I think I could create a manifest fairly easily.

I already support geolocation via the button next to the search field. I'll add this to my (long) todo list. Feel free to open a PR, too, if you want to take a crack at it.