For the residents under MCO 2.0—which now includes all states except Sarawak— residents are prohibited from travelling outside a 10km radius for any essential services.
Hence, Edwin Masripan thought it an opportune time to create a simple website, DudukDiam, to help Malaysians stay at home and exercise, or shop within 10km of their homes.
The Marketing Strategist and CEO of Laman7 believes that it would be helpful if one gets stopped by police.
A Circle In The Dark
Here’s how it works. The moment you enter the site, DudukDiam will automatically pinpoint your location and paint a 10km radius around where you are.
This can only work if you’ve enabled location services on your browser. If the detection is inaccurate, you can drag the pin to your desired location.
However, DudukDiam is not the only platform that can do this. Last week, my relative shared an Irish version of such a tool called KM From Home. It was launched in March 2020 after the Irish Government announced their own version of the MCO.
Today, I was made aware of another Malaysian app, Getmakan that can do the same. Its main focus, in addition to benefiting the public, is to help small-time F&Bs increase their sales.
Edwin told Vulcan Post that he was indeed inspired by the Irish platform. But he wanted to improve it by making a dark mode version so that people could focus on the radius instead of the map.
Purposely Built Simple
After trying out KM From Home, I personally found that I wanted more from DudukDiam. For starters, I wished it had a search function and the ability to view the exact street names I’d like to travel to, which the Irish site has.
In the event I got stopped by cops, I also wondered if showing a cop this 10km radius on DudukDiam was enough to justify my errand run. But Edwin clarified that DudukDiam hasn’t actually been tested at any police roadblocks yet.
Personally, I use Google Maps and Waze to check my 10km radius from home. Their benefit is that they can tell you the exact distance of a restaurant/shop from your home.
The latter, I might add, can even pinpoint where the exact roadblocks are to either avoid or watch out for, which I found incredibly useful.
DudukDiam doesn’t offer quite as many features, but it wasn’t Edwin’s intention to make it so detailed either.
His goal was simply to take the essence of KM From Home and make it simpler and easier to look at, hence the lack of small street names and the dark mode it’s in.
Furthermore, DudukDiam was built with urgency. “I built this web-app in 5 hours as an MVP (minimum viable product) and improved the features with 2 more hours,” he said.
“At the moment, I don’t have any more features to add on. The goal is to make a simple 10km radius, which has been achieved. Although I do get feature requests to display local shops and businesses within 10km, I have not thought about it deeper, and it may be on a different web app.”
On future developments for DudukDiam, depending on the Majlis Keselamatan Negara’s (MKN) orders, he may add radiuses for 5km, 20km, etc.
But do note that for those living close to district or state borders, inter-district and inter-state travel is still not allowed.
His Way To Practice A Skill
As DudukDiam is not being monetised, it’s just a way for Edwin to give back to Malaysians while brushing up on his coding skills in design, HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
He worked on it alone as despite being a CEO of a digital media company with staff on hand to help him, he didn’t want to give them extra work.
Though it’s meant to target the local market, DudukDiam can work outside of Malaysia too. It’s already had visitors from the US, Singapore, Japan, and the UAE.
But from my testing, the map is most developed for those in Malaysia, as you’ll be able to see the actual names of neighbourhoods when zoomed in.
Featured Image Credit: Edwin Masripan, creator of DudukDiam