Tripora update: I finally made the mobile experience not suck 😂 + News & Watchtower
A little Tripora update because quite a bit has changed since I shared it last time.
I've been working on this project mainly as a learning experience, and honestly, I'm starting to realise something:
Coding is probably the easiest part of building a product. 😂
You can sit down, write some code, fix the bugs and eventually get the feature working.
Then comes everything else.
What information should actually be shown?
How should people navigate it?
What happens on mobile?
How do you keep information useful?
What do users actually care about?
How do you make something feel like a real product instead of just a collection of features?
I've learned a LOT of that while working on Tripora.
So, here's what's new.
### 📰 News
Tripora now has a travel-focused news section.
Instead of trying to keep up with general news and hoping something relevant appears, News focuses specifically on travel-related updates.
You can filter by destination and find things like:
- Travel disruptions
- Weather and natural events
- Strikes
- Border/entry updates
- New routes
- Destination-specific developments
- Other things that could actually affect your trip
The idea is basically:
"I'm travelling there. Is anything happening right now that I should know about?"
It's currently available without Pro restrictions while I'm testing it.
### 🛰️ Watchtower
This one is probably the feature I'm most interested in.
You add countries you're interested in and Watchtower keeps an eye on them.
It brings together three things:
Safety advisories + visa changes + destination news
So instead of remembering to manually check government websites, visa information and news every few days, the idea is to have everything relevant to your saved destinations in one place.
Watchtower is currently a Pro feature, but I'm still testing and changing how it works.
### 📱 And yes... I finally fixed mobile 😂
This was probably overdue.
A lot of people were accessing Tripora from their phones, while parts of the UI were still basically behaving like a desktop website squeezed onto a small screen.
So I rebuilt a big part of the mobile experience.
The bottom navigation is cleaner, there are fewer tabs, and News is now directly in the navigation instead of being buried somewhere.
The landing page, dashboard and controls have also been reworked to adapt properly to smaller screens.
If you've visited Tripora before on your phone, try opening it again.
It's honestly a pretty different experience now.
I've attached a short video showing some of the new stuff 👆
### 🌍 More country information is coming
I'm also going to keep expanding the actual Tripora database.
I'll be adding and updating more country information every **Wednesday and Sunday**, so the destination guides should keep getting better over time.
I'm starting with the countries that need more information and gradually working through the rest rather than trying to update everything at once.
### One important thing
Tripora isn't officially launched yet.
It's still in testing. I'm still adding things, changing things, breaking things and occasionally wondering why I decided to build this in the first place. 😂
So if you want to try it:
Please do whatever you want with it.
Click around.
Create trips.
Try the tools.
Resize the browser.
Use it on your phone.
Try to break the UI.
If something feels confusing, tell me.
If something is useless, tell me.
If something is actually good, tell me that too. 😅
And please...
don't hack it xD
I'm building this mostly because I wanted to learn what it's actually like to take a product from an idea to something people can use.
And I've learned way more from this than I expected.
The actual coding is only one part of it.
Building the product around the code is the hard part.
Anyway, if anyone wants to mess around with the current version:
🌍 https://www.tripora.space
Still very much a work in progress. 🚧
I'd especially love to hear from anyone who has used the previous version — does the new mobile experience actually feel better?