Basically I think city guides are obsolete (they have been there for 200 years with no major innovation) and have to be reinvented and trip planning automatized using APIs we have online. I currently use 6 of them: foursquare, songkick, instagram, google places, google translate and facebook.
I've been working on this for the past 8 months, but I'm having UX difficulties keeping such a complex problem as simple as possible. I first started this during the foursquare hackathon 2011 and the project won the grand prize (called my next trip at that time).
Would love to hear any feedbacks you got at feedback@tripovore.com
Would love to know what's the source of the location name autocomplete, this is not the first page where my city name of "Taipei" gets corrected to merely "Da-an District, Taiwan" - no city name, just one of the many districts of the city. If I wasn't living here, it would be mighty confusing.
Wow, really like the visuals. A quick suggestion would be to have the route shown on the map. It would provide a visual tie-in with suggested itinerary.
Thanks man. Routes are hard to do with Google Maps + Google Directions. But you get an idea of the walking time it would take you, between steps. But there's a bug I have to fix there.
I've been working on this for 2-3 months and realized I don't have enough time to donate to it. So, I open sourced it. I always envisioned it paired with a mobile app. It's written in AngularJS and Rails hopefully someone can start helping me where I left off.
Thanks, there are parts of this that I really like. I'm hopeful that more developers will follow in this trend and release their projects in works as open source projects.
Incidentally in reviewing I also came across some of your other projects, (sockclub.com, cam.ly etc) - kudos on taking your ideas all the way!
This is a great idea. Nice work. I'm probably the only one here but everytime i see open source I run to github hoping for a python project but almost always am looking at ROR .... oh well
Nice app :) Once you have decided all the destinations you'd like to see, it'd be sweet if it could tell you how to go there (i.e. plan the optimal route)
I did this side project http://www.routific.com to do route optimization (you can also specify time-windows, which would be neat for opening/closing hours) -- the algorithm is open source: https://github.com/mck-/Open-VRP -- perhaps an idea to integrate it?
Half-off topic/rant: I would love if trip route planning tools could take into account public open/close time information. Twice I've been in the South Dakota area on road trips, and each time I miss being able to see the Minute Man silo site near Rapid City because they lock the fence up around it outside of visitor hours for security reasons:
This is great.. why dont you pursue further? Looks like some of it is coming from 4sq api, I can help you there if you are stuck.
Kudos on working on it, and hope you find time to continue building on it. One specific feature that will make it so much easier is if there was a way to bootstrap your list. May be display top tourist locations to start with.. you can also search for tiplists on foursquare to give user starting point. Not sure if you already do that, and I just couldnt figure out..
Thanks for the kind words and feedback. I agree about bootstrapping a list. Suggested places feature is a top priority. Do you work for 4sq? If so please email me: hn handle at gmail
Wow nice work. When I travel outside I usually use wikipedia to get a list of places where I should go. But a direct recommendation from friends is a lot better since wikipedia lists only places/things that are relatively popular.
I think a mobile app that keeps track of the paces you have been and then syncs it to wanderlust for friends to see could be really good. I think facebook does it but here it would make sense.
The travel industry is plagued by Trip planning startups that don't make it. I would have thought one of these might have open-sourced their code before.
I couldn't find any open source projects when I looked before I started the project. It's a good point that the internet is filled with trip planning software. I found many web apps but I didn't love any of them. Hopefully this will bring us a closer to a trip planning webapp that actually works.
I love the app. Very simple and easy to use, I would include facebook as you move towards mobile. It would be nice to see what my trips and plans my friends have in their travels and being able to browse that would prompt me to use the app more and keep me on the app longer. More of a UX comment for the future but I hope it helps. Keep it up. #teamopensource
Wow that is wonderful! Great idea! I have a tourism related startup I shut down 1 year ago, very similar to this, but it was more basic. I was write it in rails as well.
I need a week off from work and I can make the UI translatable and finish the Hungarian translation if you are interested.
I did not check the source, is it planned to show recommended destinations after I selected a city?
I had created a travel app very very similar to yours earlier this year using RoR and AngularJS as well. Eventually it fell on the wayside. I just open sourced it: https://github.com/jesalg/Travelizer
We should talk about how to collaborate our efforts.
Cheers, this is interesting as I've recently started a travel planning project, incorporating prices of flights, lately. Would love to chat to others who've gained traction, and started making sales in this area.
Seriously, what is the point of making such a pointless statement like "meh, this would take an hour in Meteor"?
Is it because "Meteor will kill Rails" is the buzzy headline of the week on HN, and you felt the need to be trendy and throw that into the discussion in this thread? What value does a comment like that add to discussion about a developer releasing a project he worked on for a few months to the open source community?
First off, it's not baseless, it really would take an hour or two for someone who is familiar with Meteor, since it's built for helping you create exactly this type of applications.
I was not discounting the work that was done but pointing out that a better platform for this application corner case would be something actually built to support real-time web applications from the ground up with less context switching, such as a full JavaScript solution. It would simply take less time and resources to build it all in JavaScript from the beginning if you're familiar with it, whether the framework was Meteor or other frameworks.
There's nothing trendy about this value judgement. Which specific part do you disagree with?
I'm not saying that Meteor is killing RoR, now you're bringing your own bias and baggage from other stories that you disagree with into this discussion. My point was for this specific application case, not broadly for all applications and implementations.
People grossly underestimate time it takes to figure out what to build, how to design UX, which APIs to use, how the workflow works. And all the inspiration that goes into coming up with something new.
Sure, if you are given a working website, and you were to replicate exact copy of it, you can do it far faster
(still not sure about 1 hour estimate-- show us if you really mean it).
Absolutely, I agree that a heck of a lot more time than 1 hour would go towards figuring out the entire user flows, UI etc. I never meant to discount that aspect and that's where some of the negative karma here is coming from.
As far as building a Meteor clone, challenge accepted. As soon as I get off work in a few hours, I'll get banging.
Basically I think city guides are obsolete (they have been there for 200 years with no major innovation) and have to be reinvented and trip planning automatized using APIs we have online. I currently use 6 of them: foursquare, songkick, instagram, google places, google translate and facebook. I've been working on this for the past 8 months, but I'm having UX difficulties keeping such a complex problem as simple as possible. I first started this during the foursquare hackathon 2011 and the project won the grand prize (called my next trip at that time).
Would love to hear any feedbacks you got at feedback@tripovore.com
Thanks!