Sunday, April 29, 2007

Featured on Taste T.O.

We've been featured on Taste T.O., a great group blog that writes about food in Toronto. Read the post here if you're interested. We're working on getting their reviews onto the site -- a couple are already up, and the rest should be soon.

It's exam season for me and Winson, but we're still working to get some important fixes implemented as fast as we can. At the top of the list, we have:
  • A facility to view all featured restaurants/dishes, and local events, as opposed to just the random ones that show when the front page is loaded.
  • A way to see multiple restaurants on the map that Google Maps thinks are in the same location (this problem is very evident on Baldwin St. -- we have a lot of the restaurants there, but it looks like there are just a couple, because they all map to the same location!)
  • Fixes to bugs in the map's filtering system.
  • Additional speed-ups with moving around/filtering the map (it's 100x better than it was just a week ago, when it would take, literally, minutes, to filter for a certain type of restaurant, and the same amount of time to move around with that filter in place.) Shows the importance of testing with a meaningful amount of data (e.g., more than just a few restaurants!)
  • Different symbols other than the spoon to represent different food types.
  • Various ways to help build a Toronto foodie community.
Also, in addition to Taste T.O., we're also in the process of getting blogTO, dine.to, and Frommer's reviews added to the site. Shouldn't be long!

Once again, if anyone has any suggestions, or feature requests, please let us know by leaving a comment here, or e-mailing us at support@startwithsoup.com.

Thanks,
Rhys

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Official beta launch!

Still some kinks to work out, and still a lot of restaurants and reviews to be added, but we have officially launched (though, we still reserve the right to call this a beta release)! Let us know here or via e-mail (rhys at startwithsoup dot com) if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. :)

Sunday, January 7, 2007

Welcome!

Hi there,

We hope you're enjoying startwithsoup.com. In this blog, we'll provide updates regarding general development and expansion plans we have for the future.

To help us out, you can let us know features that you'd like to see, or places (in Canada, the United States, or, well, anywhere in the world) that you'd like us to expand to. You can also report on problems you've found with the site, large or small.

Thanks!
Rhys