May Update — Accounts, Car Parks & More

Big month. Like, genuinely big. This one came in at £40 in AI development time and it's packed — here's everything that's new.

You've got an account now

Well, you can. Sign up is free and there's no password to forget — just pop your email in and we'll send you a magic link. One click and you're in. It expires after 15 minutes, so no dawdling.

Once you're signed in, you get your own Account page where you can set a display name and pick your colour theme (light, dark, or let your device decide). The good bit? Your settings follow you everywhere. Switch device, open a new tab, come back a week later — it all just works. No more fighting the theme toggle every time.

Tick off your adventures

Found a new favourite? Went on a bit of a chippy crawl? You can now mark venues as visited straight from the venue page. They save to your account and sync across everything. Whether you're a meticulous list-ticker or just like seeing those little checkmarks pile up — this one's for you.

Car parks, finally

We've added car parks to the map — properly, with actual shapes rather than just a pin in the car park somewhere. Toggle the P button in the map controls and you'll see them drawn out as soft blue overlays, so you can actually tell how big they are and where they sit. Zoom in and they get a parking icon. Tap one and you'll see the name, type, capacity, and pricing info where we have it.

Because parking in Blackpool shouldn't be a mystery.

Feeling lucky?

This is the one. Hit the dice button and the map picks a completely random venue from whatever you're looking at, flies over to it, and opens it up. Random chippy. Random gem you've never heard of. Total surprise.

The clever bit: it respects your filters. So if you've narrowed it down to highly rated pizza spots and fancy a bit of a lottery — go for it. The dice has your back.

See how far you can go

The new bullseye button drops colour-coded rings onto the map showing how far you can walk or drive in 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes. Toggle between walking and driving in the panel that appears. If you've shared your location, the rings centre on you — if not, they'll use wherever the map is looking.

Think of it as "how much of Blackpool can I eat in half an hour."

A few more map bits

Get directions — every venue now has Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps links. No more copying addresses into your phone.
Nearest first — hit Locate Me and the sidebar re-sorts automatically to show what's closest. Not feeling it? Flip back to A–Z any time.
Open now filter — filter to just venues that are open right now. Fair warning: we're still filling in opening times across the board, so this one's a bit patchy at the moment — but it's there and it'll get better.

More info on venue pages

Venue pages now show your full hygiene rating history — every inspection on record, the individual penalty-point scores broken down into plain English, which council rated them, and a streak badge if they've kept the same rating across multiple visits.

We've also tidied up how the page looks — tags in neat little chips, the BGG rating badge sitting next to the hygiene score, address shown cleanly under the name.

That said: we've crammed a lot in and honestly it's starting to look a bit chaotic. A proper layout refresh is top of the list for next month.

What's next

Here's the honest version: features are going to calm down for a bit.

There's already a lot on the map. The thing holding it back now isn't the feature list — it's the data underneath. Opening times. Missing venues. Inconsistent info. That's what we're tackling next, because a map is only as good as what it actually shows you.

We're still very much open to requests (always), and next month will bring the venue page redesign plus a round of bug fixes that have been quietly stacking up. Just don't expect a megadrop like this one every month.

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Nerd? The full changelog has all the details:

/documentation-viewer#CHANGELOG

Thanks for being here. — Charlie