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Parchment devlogPart 5 of 5

Where Parchment stands, and what is left

In this series

  1. 1How I built a maps app on open dataWhat Parchment is, who it is for, and the four commitments it runs on. The rest of the series is how far that has actually got.
  2. 2Where Parchment startedThe goal was a maps app that is private, self-hostable and free, built on open data. The free public endpoints were not a shortcut around that goal. They were the goal.
  3. 3Turning map providers into an interfaceParchment stopped asking which service to call and started asking which job needs doing. The idea came from Home Assistant, and it changed how every feature after it got designed.
  4. 4The subsystem that became a productThe free APIs were not too expensive. They were unchangeable. Building my own geospatial engine split the architecture in two, and the half that holds no personal data turned out to be a business.
  5. 5Where Parchment stands, and what is leftYou are hereParchment is in closed alpha behind a waitlist. Here is what works, what is still being built, and what has to be true before I let more people in.

The first four entries are how Parchment got here. This one is where it actually is, which is a less tidy answer: in closed alpha, behind a waitlist, with a small group of people using it daily and a lot of unfinished edges.

It runs on the web, iOS, Android and desktop from one codebase, and it is self-hostable end to end. That part is done. What is not done is everything between “works” and “ready for the public”.

What works#

  • Search and places. 44 browse categories, including the ones other maps skip: drinking water, benches, bike parking, defibrillators. Place pages read OpenStreetMap tags back in plain language, in your own language where mappers recorded one, with opening hours resolved in the place’s own time zone.
  • Directions. Driving, cycling, walking and transit, with departure boards, isochrones and a carbon figure for each route.
  • The map. A globe at low zoom, day and night styles, indoor floor plans, and street-level imagery from Mapillary. Layers cover weather, air quality from OpenAQ and active wildfires from NASA FIRMS.
  • Your own data. Saved places and collections, offline regions, optional location history that stays on your server, and OpenStreetMap editing, so a place page that is wrong can be fixed at the source rather than reported into a void.
A transit leg shows the next several departures, not just the first, and keeps the ones you already missed on screen.

What I am working on#

Almost none of the remaining work is new features. It is the difference between software that functions and software you would hand to someone without an apology.

The interface. A good deal of the app works without being good yet. Screens that function are not the same as screens I would hand to a stranger, and this is the slowest category by some distance, because a unit test doesn’t fail when a panel is merely awkward to look at.

Native mobile apps. Parchment already runs on iOS and Android, but from the same codebase as everything else, which shows. Native clients are in the pipeline: ones that follow each platform’s own design language properly rather than wearing the same interface twice. A maps app is something you open one-handed while navigating a metro system, and it should look and perform like it belongs on the device.

Transit. The richest source of real bugs, and each one is somebody’s actual commute. Transit is unforgiving in a way road routing is not. A wrong turn in a car costs you a minute. A missed connection costs you twenty, in the cold.

Getting facts right. Opening hours, closures, and the long tail of what OpenStreetMap records versus what is true on the ground. A maps app that lies about whether somewhere is open is worse than one that says nothing at all.

Planet-scale servers that run reliably and efficiently. Building Barrelman and operating it turn out to be different jobs. Imports have to finish, indexes have to stay fresh, and queries have to stay fast with the whole planet sitting behind them. Efficient enough that a free tier is not charity, and steady enough that people trust it with directions while they are already late.

The commercial side. Billing and the paywall behind Barrelman’s free-for-individuals model. That is the last structural piece rather than a polish item.

The last stretch before beta#

The waitlist exists because I would rather disappoint people slowly than all at once. Alpha testers know they are testing something. Beta users reasonably expect it to work.

So the next step is a beta with the doors opened part way: a limited group of testers, and possibly limited regions to begin with.

I have been talking to municipal governments and to other engineers about what that rollout looks like — a partnership in some places, a route to a business that sustains itself in others. The condition is the same either way. None of it at the product’s expense.

If you want to be in that group, the waitlist is open.