This is a big day for DayTrip, as we’ve been looking forward to sharing this feature for a long time. We’re excited to officially launch user tips!

So what’s the big deal about user tips?

Whenever we see someone log a spot on DayTrip we’re always curious about their experience. Did they have fun? Was the spot crowded? Were their kids entertained? Logging a spot only tells a small part of the story. We want to know how the trip went and what to do when we go ourselves. Maybe you have a favorite food order or you just discovered a great new hiking trail. “Don’t mess it up” has always been our slogan.

So what kind of tips should I leave?

First and foremost, we always want to know if you liked a spot. While our goal is to only include the best spots, we know that everyone has different tastes. Here are some other helpful suggestions:

• Favorite trails to hike and degree of difficulty
• What to bring
• Best time to go
• Favorite thing to order at a cafe
• Favorite beer at a brewery
• Parking tips
• Useful advice for kids
• Kid friendly places
• Pet friendly places
• Best time to go camping
• A fun place you like to go afterwards
• Alternatives if a spot is too crowded

We’ve also capped the length of tips to 500 characters, which is roughly 2 paragraphs. We like to keep things simple, and more direct tips are easier to scan. As Joe Friday would say, “Just the facts ma’am.”

What’s Next?

It’s prime DayTrip season. Get out there, have fun, and start leaving some tips. You definitely don’t have to be at a spot to leave a tip… it can be somewhere you visited last week or last year. Share your knowledge!

We’re happy to announce DayTrip is now a fully responsive Progressive Web App, a combination of new web technologies championed by Google Chrome. Starting this week, Android users (~13% of our active user base) who use DayTrip more than once will eventually be asked if they want to install our web app to their Home Screen. That’s important real estate for a small startup like ourselves.

What’s this mean for me?

Progressive Web Apps are aimed at giving fast, reliable, native “app-like” experiences. After being installed, you’ll be able to launch DayTrip from your Home Screen and it will behave like an app you downloaded from an App Store.

In addition to that, Progressive Web Apps improve your offline experience. Getting people offline is major part of why DayTrip exists. If you find yourself in the woods with bad cell signal, previously viewed pages on your device will be cached and available offline.

Why not just go native?

“Why not just go native?” is a good question and frequent feedback request. Truth be told, we actually headed down that direction. We built an API and prototyped multi-platform mobile clients but hit a wall where we had to make an important decision whether or not to continue development.

For such a small team, diverting resources to create native clients meant the core product wasn’t being worked on. Our prototypes never wowed us and it seemed like we were making herculean efforts to create native clients that were only about 10% different than the responsive web product.

For our situation, it made more sense to stick to our wheelhouse, avoid App Store drama and disillusionment, and focus on improving and expanding the flagship web product. Thankfully, Progressive Web Apps were on the horizon and match our business model perfectly.

What’s next?

In the short term we’ll be improving our basic offline experience and figuring out how we can use Service Workers (a new browser technology) to make the DayTrip speedier and more useful.

In addition to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge have also shown interest in supporting Progressive Web Apps. The lone hold out right now is Apple’s Safari. While that excludes a majority of our mobile users, we’re bullish on the future of Progressive Web Apps. We’re fans of an App Store model where the relationship between a device and an app, just like human interest, grows over time.

This week the amigos took a lunchtime day trip to Taylor, TX for some Louie Mueller Barbecue. Being so close to Austin, it’s amazing what you can enjoy if you extend your lunch break by 30 minutes. We left at 11:00 and got back to the office at 12:30. Louie Mueller is easily one of our favorites in the BBQ category. We’ll be taking more of these trips, and hope to bring more friends along. Follow us on Twitter for updates!

Breweries have always been one of our favorite categories, and we’re happy to add three new ones to the mix. Last Stand Brewing Company opened it’s doors in 2015, and is only a mile past Jester King on Fitzhugh Road. It was recently voted the “Best New Brewery” by the Austin Beer Guide. After adding Last Stand, we decided to go ahead and add Thirsty Planet Brewering Company as well. Although technically in Austin, it’s right off Highway 290 on the way to Jester King and Last Stand. We think it would make a killer trifecta of breweries to visit on a lazy Saturday.

Rentsch Brewery is a new up-and-coming brewery in Georgetown, also opening in 2015. We think it would be a great 1-2 punch with 600 Degrees Pizzeria & Drafthouse.

There’s nothing like finding a nice spot to relax for a beer after a long day of hiking or swimming. While breweries are always a great choice, they can sometimes have weird hours or be too far out of the way. We think our new watering hole category will be just what the doctor ordered. Here are a few things we took into consideration when picking the perfect one:

• Easy to get to
• Close to other spots
• Great local beer selection (bonus points for brewing their own beer)
• Margaritas
• Plenty of outdoor seating
• Misters and/or fans outside
• Outdoor games like washers or cornhole
• A place for the kids to run around (bonus points for a playscape)
• Great views
• Some food to nibble on
• Friendly, laid-back staff
• Fire pits
• Live music
• Local establishment (no chains)
• Pet friendly

As always, let us know if we misssed a spot.

Today we rolled out another one of our most requested features: Maps! But rather than bore you with a bunch of words, we’ll tell you about it BuzzFeed-style.

At first we we like…

Then we were like…

So we asked our boss…

And then we were like…

And now we’re like…

The wordier version

Maps is another one of our most requested features. Austin is growing at a pace of 150 people per day, so it’s not a shock that people (especially newcomers) are unfamiliar with the locations and town names around Austin. They all end in “–burg” or “–ville” and are pronounced differently than how they’re spelled.

It seems obvious that a geolocation-based application like DayTrip should have a map. Geolocation = Map! Duh! Yet, as we started to sketch and build out the feature, we noticed that maps are actually a terrible way to find things. From a UX perspective, it’s a lot of hunt-and-pecking around a mystery-meat navigation of location pin icons to hopefully find something that interests you. Maps tend to work better with a smaller, digestible, set of options.

A map of all the spots on DayTrip wasn’t the solution. A map of all the spots in a town wasn’t really the solution either. The feature wasn’t really working until we tried it with Towns.

Browsing towns in a map view is fairly intuitive and helpful. It helps makes sense of where destinations are in relation to one another.

Open the Towns Map

And since towns are essentially a collection of spots, we can guarantee that you’ll be able to spend a full day out and about. We think you’ll really like how it turned out.

If have strong feels about our town map, let us know, we’d love your feedback.

We just added a new restaurant category to DayTrip. We already had cafes, so you might be asking why we added restaurants? Well, in our eyes a restaurant and a cafe in Texas are very different. We made a handy little chart so you’ll know the difference:

Great news, everyone! We’ve just rolled out one of the most requested features: Sortable Lists. Spots (in a category) or Towns can now be sorted by their ranking and/or number of spots, distance, or alphabetically.

It already seems useful in finding the quickest way to get out of town and get somewhere interesting. Let us know if this helps you in your travels. We’d love your feedback.

We’ve begun work on views for people who are either signed out or don’t have an account. Figuring the most useful view to share would be the spot view, we started there. As of today, you can share spots (spot URLs like this one) with anyone, and they’ll see this…

This can be helpful if you’re trying to organize a meetup, or if you just want everyone to know how wisely you’re spending your time. Share away, y’all!

We’re very happy to bring you a new set of spots this week. We’re constantly listening to your recommendations and adding new places. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new:

Burgers

Taproom in San Marcos
They have a guacamole queso burger that we’re dying to try. They also have 42 beers on tap, so it’s definitely a great place to hang out.

Dave’s Burger Barn in Waco
Who wants to go for the Zipper Ripper (pictured above)?

Burger University in Georgetown
A great place to grab a burger in Georgetown’s beautiful downtown square. Stay tuned - we have some more Georgetown spots coming soon.

Wineries

Georgetown Winery in Georgetown
Another downtown gem! Georgetown is shaping up to be a great trip that’s really close and easy to get to.

BBQ

HWY 29 BBQ in Bertram
We’ve got a couple of great new BBQ spots in the Burnet area. Hit them up after a trip to Inks Lake.

Payne’s Bar-B-Q Shak in Burnet
Definitely wins the award for best hand-painted fence (pictured above).

Music

Nutty Brown Cafe in Dripping Springs
It’s technically in Austin, but we think it’d be a great part of a day trip to Dripping Springs. Adding Salt Lick and Jester King would make a p perfect day if you ask us.

Mercer Street Dance Hall in Dripping Springs
We’re excited about all the places we’ve discovered out in Dripping Springs. It’s such an easy drive. Stay tuned for more.

As always, keep your recommendations coming.

Howdy, friends! We’re happy to announce that we’ve lifted the beta and now anyone can sign up for DayTrip. Thanks to all our beta testers—your feedback and opinions have really helped shape things. Keep it coming!

We’re excited for this next phase in growth for DayTrip. In fact, last week during our stealthy out-of-beta phase, our traffic more than doubled which means we now have hundreds of active users using the site.

We’re hard at work on some great new spots and features to make DayTrip even more useful as you explore the world around you. We’re still Austin-only for right now, but feel free to head over and sign up.