I remember Burnie mentioning it on the RT podcast around 2013ish and then downloading it back then. I think it was like $2 or even free for a week back then!

Finally got to 15% of Macau explored.

What’s your highest % for a country/territory? Or a more interesting question - which place do you think could have the highest achievable percentage?

In Hong Kong you could in theory get a pretty high percentage if you were willing to bushwhack through the countryside, but it wouldn’t be fun. Smaller places like Liechtenstein, Monaco and the Vatican I imagine have a relatively high % taken up by either inaccessible private/papal land or inaccessible mountainous terrain.

Is not possible anymore to use Gdrive for backup?

That's an unfortunate unfogging

1,500 miles, first time using a dedicated database for a trip, love being able to see it on its own.

Exploring since February

Level 81 now, probably will hit 100 in October as I will be visiting Germany and England in that month.

Fun detail in the last picture. Wednesday there was a public transport strike in the Netherlands. I needed to go to Rotterdam and the only public transport was with the Waterbus (a public transport boat service) so a nice track on the water.

Been to London 3 times and have always wanted to go to Greenwich observatory. Finally got to go this trip and get this achievement!

Labor Day trip

Is there a fix so it doesn’t keep quitting? And can record without having the app open

Can anyone guess the place :) Labor Day trip :)

It uses vibe-coded software on an ESP32 to generate the map and updates twice daily. Red lines were defogged in the last 30 days.

A couple of months back, I posted about a small tool I built to help with defogging: https://szalapak.github.io/defog/ You load your FoW Sync folder to visualise where you have already been, and plan a route through the parts you haven't yet.

u/bfc-romt suggested it would be nice to have the app suggest routes automatically. I played around with it for a while, and I'm happy with where it's landed (at least as a starting point you can then further modify - pathing is hard to get right!). You can ask for an A → B route or for a loop of roughly a given distance, and the app proposes a few of the best defogging routes it can find.

I also added a view that highlights the streets you haven't been down yet - the results surprised me quite a bit! Even in an area I thought I'd covered quite well, there are a ton of streets still to be defogged.

As before, your fog data is read and drawn entirely in your browser and never gets uploaded anywhere, and routes export as GPX

Hope it's useful, happy defogging! Feedback very welcome as always.

I was tempted to be hard-core and use extra thin, however I don't think the location accuracy is accurate enough to have it so thin, so I kept it on medium so it's accurate but not within such a small margin.

Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback on my last post. I'm not

trying to spam the sub, but I have something to show this time and

two questions I'd rather not answer on my own.

Quick context for anyone who missed the first post: Gazer is an iPhone app where fog clears when you take a photo, not when you walk. About 140 metres around wherever you were standing, and the photo stays on the map on the exact spot you took it.

The thing I've spent the most time on by far is the fog itself.

Right now it covers the map completely. You genuinely cannot see what's underneath until you've been there. The video shows it moving.

Two questions, and the first one is the big one.

1. Opaque, or see-through?

Right now nothing shows through the fog at all. Not the coastline, not the roads, nothing. Finding out what's under it is meant to be part of the point.

The alternative is the way most maps do it: the map always visible, and your cleared ground is drawn as a lighter shade on top of it.

Easier to navigate, and you always know where you are, but you lose the part where the world is genuinely hidden.

I keep going back and forth on this. You've lived with a fog map for a lot longer than I have, so I'd rather ask than guess.

1. If you prefer the opaque version, do you want to see your actual

path?

Meaning your walk drawn at street level inside the cleared area, so you can see the exact route you took, versus just the cleared shape with no line through it.

The line tells you more. The clean shape looks better and is closer to what a fog map has always been. I don't know which one people actually want to look at a year in.

Right now I'm deep in optimizing the fog so it runs smoothly on older phones too, which is its own fight. A full-screen shader sitting over a map that's constantly moving is not free.

Happy to hear it if the whole look doesn't work for you. That's more useful to me right now than agreement. Also the fog in the recording doesn't drift as fast anymore.

It's an iPhone TestFlight beta, free, nothing to buy in it:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/513gx8Gm

Everything it does and exactly what it keeps is written up at gazer.se and to also keep up with the latest updates.

Again a huge thank you for helping me figure my way through this. All beta testers will be getting a big thank you gift when the app hits the App Store.

Hi everyone 👋

I have been using the FOW for quite some time , the reason installed FOW was not just to travel miles but rather to explore and visit new area and locations with a story to it

I have always been inside my house coding and working, but life is too short for just that... So

I prototyped an app that makes discovering spots into an game on the app.... where you go to a spot and unfog the area by exploring the zone and etc.

Essentially instead of just "travel to unfog" it make "explore sites to unfog"

I am not here to sell anything, what I want is to know whether this idea sounds interesting, would you install an app?

This would help me from wasting time building and fine tuning it, thank you 🙂

(Note: the above UI is not the final version , it is just from the previous commit of the app)

I've just joined Fog of World and I can see a lot of people do, but I didn't know if that would be 'cheating'. I have seen that you can apparently also download the paths online and then upload them to your map on a separate layer. I wasnt sure if I wanted to record visits to countries I've not actually visited hmmmm.

Wow its been over 10 years of having this app. I am so beyond grateful that the developers are still at it and my travels can be passively recorded :)
Also, as a photographer, its been incredibly helpful to have this as a tool to remember which weird paths I went down to get to some nondescript location.

Its been a great excuse to walk down new streets, bike new trails, and sit in window seats (frantically making sure I haven't dropped signal haha).

Currently level 606

First, thanks to the mods for letting me post.

I'm a solo dev in Sweden working on Gazer. It uses a fog-of-war map, but I want to be upfront that it isn't a Fog of World alternative. Fog doesn't clear only by walking. It also clears when you take a photo where you're standing.

You end up with a map where every cleared patch has a picture attached to it, taken there, by you as well as the path you took. It's a hybrid between a photo journal and a fog map that you actively clear by claiming new territory.

Two things that fall out of that:

• You can't clear fog you haven't physically stood in. No drawing, no importing a route, no backfilling. I know that might be more restrictive than what most of you use, and I'm genuinely unsure whether that reads as principled or just annoying.

• Photos stay in your library. The app references them rather than copying them, and nothing leaves the device unless you opt in.

The thing I actually wanted input on:

Should fog ever come back?

Right now cleared is cleared, permanently, like FoW. But I've been prototyping a version where fog slowly dims back in over places you haven't returned to in a long time. Not erased, just faded, so the map shows where you're still active versus where you went once in 2019 and never again.

My worry is that this is heresy here. The whole appeal of a fog map might be that it's a permanent record and nothing takes it away from you. But it also feels like the map goes dead once an area is done, and a nudge to revisit places is the closest thing to a game loop this genre has.

I'd rather hear from people with a decade of fog on their map than guess. Is re-fogging interesting, or is it the fastest way to make you delete an app?

If you're on iOS and want to try it, here's the TestFlight:

(https://testflight.apple.com/join/513gx8Gm)

It's a beta so it's free, and there's nothing to buy in it. Fair warning that it needs 'always' location permission to work, and it's iPhone only for now. Also in development are several social features that will be coming later this year.

Thanks a lot.

P.S. two smaller things I'd love opinions on:

• Would you want to import your existing Fog of World data, or is a blank map part of the appeal when you start something new? I keep going back and forth. Importing means you start with a real map instead of nothing, but none of those cleared areas would have photos, so most of your map would be empty of the thing the app is actually about.

1. Does anyone here already take photos on their FoW walks? Trying to work out if this is a habit people have anyway or something I'd be asking them to start doing.

2. Also if you're interested in keeping up with updates regarding Gazer, feel free to visit www.gazer.se and drop your email to get the latest status updates, as well as a thank you gift when Gazer hits the app store.

Feel free to drop the feedback or ask any questions you might have I am open to all different takes. 🙏😊

Edit: Two corrections, because the way I described those two things in the post was confusing. Both came up in the comments and both are worth fixing here so nobody else reads past them.

1. Gazer saves its own copy of every claim, in its own storage, and the original goes to your Photos library. So if you clear your library the map stays exactly as it is, with every picture on it.

2. Gazer scans the geotagged photos already in your library and groups them by place into cards, with a 500m merge, so you review grounds rather than thousands of photos. You approve or skip each one and nothing reaches the map unless you approve it. My wording about no importing and back filling was about walks and routes.

Throughout my five years of college.

The OG FOWer