January 2024—The Explore Cities! app is a result of me trying to resist building yet another travel app for over a year. And then doing exactly that.

It all started with the sketch above. The rough idea being to share your walks and discoveries with others, with would motivate you and the others to take more walks.

“Walk” meaning taking a stroll without any specific destination. Or: a Lindy Walk.

The idea originally came from Patricia of The Flaneurs Project.

Another influence were miniature city models, like one above from the excellent Frankfurt city museum.

With all the love I hold for vintage maps, there’s just something about 3D models that makes our brains understand spaces much more intuitively.

Google Maps and Apple Maps have 3D modes, but they don’t allow you to zoom out very far and are cluttered by an endless amount of “top attractions”.

I suspect that’s because maps are currently understood by most people to take you to the exact best destination, on the shortest route possible.

But when traveling or talking walk leasurely, I just want to know where I am roughly in the city, and what’s nearby. So I can decide for myself in which direction to continue.

March 2024—Thankfully, Mapbox proved capable to render such a simple 3D map.

It took a while to generate my own map data for the entire world based on Overture, but now you can zoom out far enough to fit an entire city on the screen.

April 2024—The next step was populating the map with at least a few markers, to give you an idea of what to expect in each area. Maybe museums and “secrets”?

Now the process of using the app looks like this: open the map, walk in the direction of the nearest icon, check out what’s there in the real world, and repeat.

I tried it out while traveling a bit, and while it turned out to be more fun than Google Maps, you were still chained to your phone.

June 2024—For which I believe the solution is showing entire neighbourhoods instead of individual spots.

So the app would only you show areas of a city that you can explore, area where you haven’t been a before. Instead of taking away the exploration.

This is Lindy. Neighbourhoods are literally the names which people invent to make sense of cities in their head.

September 2024—To fill each neighbourhood with content, I went back to the photo-sharing aspect of the original “social walks” idea.

The app now connects to you photos library and checks which neighbourhoods you’ve already visited based on the photo locations.

Then it prompts you to share some of your photos to unlock the photos from others in the community. Community — that seems to be the key.

November 2024—After an intense few weeks of finishing the rough parts of the app, renaming it to “Explore Cities!”, and fighting the App Store reviewers, it’s done!

Version 1 of app is live in the App Store. Now let’s test try out this community idea in the real world.

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