Wanderpin - Blog 5 - Update press play, watch your trip turn into a movie

Live: https://wanderpin-ecru.vercel.app/

You drop a few pins on a globe and hit Play - and instead of a checklist, you get a cinematic fly-through you can actually share. This update was about chasing one idea until the app felt alive: the journey is the hero, the logistics hide in a drawer.

The payoff

Play used to just stop. Now it lands: the camera pulls back to frame the route, the arcs light up, and a date-stamped card counts up your distance, stops, countries and time. A little classifier scores the trip and picks the camera - a city hop zooms in, a round-the-world trip shows the marble. You also pick how you travel each leg (walk/train/flight…), which bends both the arc shape and the trip’s duration.

Then three swings: export the fly-through as a video (recorded straight off the globe canvas, no server), “been there” pins that glow gold once visited, and a living globe - a warm daylight terminator plus each stop’s local time and current weather.

What broke

Geocode 500’d in prod, every call. Not a geocoding bug at all: type: "module" means Vercel runs the API as native ESM, and Node demands file extensions on imports. from "./_nominatim" crashed at load. One .js fixed it.

The terminator looked gloomy. Darkening the night side just made an already-night map muddy. I flipped it - glow the sunlit side instead - and it finally read as “half the globe is lit.”

Two suns. Every clear-sky stop showed ☀️ 06:28 · ☀️ 15° - my day marker next to the weather glyph.

ngl used AI to build this image 😛