Wayloft

Context

Saving and reviewing places already exists, but as a side feature of tools built for something else, like Google Maps. Wayloft is built only for that: keep a record of where you’ve been, keep a wishlist of where you want to go, and get a straight answer to “what’s worth doing around here?”, whether you’re bored, traveling somewhere new or deciding where to take someone.

It covers recreational places only (food, cafés, landmarks, parks, activities), not a general business directory.

Every place comes from Google Places, which charges per request. That made cost a design constraint from day one, not something to fix later.

What we did

¿Wayloft es producto propio del estudio o proyecto personal de Jose Miguel? We’re designing and building Wayloft from the ground up. Some of what’s built so far:

• Map as the main screen. Full-screen map on mobile with a draggable results sheet; map and results side by side on desktop. Category filters (cafés, food, bars, landmarks, parks, museums…) scoped to the area you’re looking at.
• Your places, three ways. Save a place to your Wishlist, mark it Visited (with a half-star rating and an optional review) or add it to Favorites. The Wishlist is always private.
• Lists, public or private. Create your own lists, share them with collaborators, copy them, and like or comment on other people’s public lists.
• A social layer. Follow people, see their activity, get in-app notifications, and choose to show your activity to friends only.
• Search that doesn’t burn money. Searches check Wayloft’s own database first and only go to Google when there isn’t enough fresh data; everything Google returns is saved, so the app depends on it less over time. The map only searches again when you tap “Search this area”.
• Fairer rankings. Places in a category are ranked with a score that weighs the rating against how many reviews back it, so a 5.0 with three reviews doesn’t beat a 4.6 with five hundred.
• Dark and light themes. A dark theme by default and a complete light theme, with colors checked against WCAG AA contrast.

Status

Wayloft is in development and not public yet, so there’s no demo or public repository. The screenshots on this page come from the working app.

screenshots of the app