Ever since I started SentoGuide I thought it would be really need if it would be possible to search for a sento near your current location. This would make it so much easier to find a public bath when you’re traveling around Japan, or even if you’d just like to explore sento in your local area.
The good people over at W3C, the organisation in charge of HTML, the engine of the internet, have recently added a very cool tool to the latest HTML version (HTML5) making it possible for websites to pull your current location from either a GPS chip in your phone or your WiFi connection. How exactly that works is beyond me, but what I do know is that all of a sudden searching sento nearby has become relatively easy from a programming stand-point, and extremely easy from a user stand-point.
I am very excited to announce the initial release of SentoNear.me, a service that lets you look for public baths near you on an iPhone (minimum OS version 3) or with the latest version of Firefox on your PC. The service is still very much in development, and any feedback would be extremely welcome.
Curious? Quickly go to SentoNear.me.
Tags: location, SentoNear.me
This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 10:49 am and is filed under About us . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Story added…
Your story has been featured on Japundit!
Seems like a decent service, but I didn't like it automatically attempting to determine my location. In and of itself, I don't much care, but there didn't seem to be an option to input a location to use instead of where I currently was. In my case, I was looking for places near Shibuya Station, but I saw no way to tell the software that.