Well, it’s done. I just submitted my entry to the 10k apart competition. It’s been a pretty intense 24 hours, but I’m glad I gave myself some extra time this morning to polish up my entry.

Planning a trip to Paris, a screenshot from an earlier build

You can try it out here - all 9766 bytes of it.

Toolchain

I built the app using:

I have some extra code that is commented out, that does an autocomplete from Wikipedia when you add a new destination to your trip. So for example, you could type ‘Montmar’ and get an autocomplete for Montmartre. It’s nice because [a] I’m not very good at french spelling and [b] you automatically get some description text of the place from Wikipedia.

I also removed a column on the left that let you organise trips to different cities. I probably would’ve been pushing the 10k limit had I kept adding features, but mainly I didn’t have time to build and test the features properly. I enjoyed having time today to add some extra destinations to the trip, change the dates a little, and test the app thoroughly on each of the browsers.

Compression

I’d like to thank Nihilogic for their awesome canvas compression technique. Because I could compress the javascript and css so effectively, I didn’t have to muck around pruning bytes from my css and javascript, which meant I could spend more time polishing the app.

For reference - here’s the breakdown of the sizes of my CSS at different stages of my development pipeline. I used a simple bash script to compile, compress and package everything.

|              | Source | Comp  | Opt  | PNG  |
| Less CSS     | 7143   | 7589  | 5961 | 1898 |
| Coffeescript | 11388  | 13742 | 9445 | 3879 |

Internet Explorer 9

It’s been an interesting experience using IE 9. It looks like it’s going to be a good browser. I will still use Safari as my main browser and development tool (even if they did release IE9 for mac), but it looks like I’ll be supporting Safari 5, Chrome, Firefox 3.5 and IE 9 in all my future web apps.

Thanks

I’d like to thank @sminnee, @ristari, @nzkoz, @clarketus, @nikz, @agrath, @terrcin, @lancehodges, @youdoham, @nazdrug and @campbell for their support, feedback and bug checking while I put this thing together. I couldn’t have got it done without you all, thanks.