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Show HN: Random Street View

randomstreetview.com

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Re: Show HN: Random Street View

#131

Post by kirchhoff »

pachydermic wrote: post #129
kirchhoff wrote: post #96

I don't mean to gatecrash, but as I have been running a near identical site for a few years I feel compelled to comment. The street views generated on this site are not really random; they are picked from a predefined list in a db. This is why duplicates appear after a number of clicks. I run http://www.mapcrunch.com which also generates random street views, but with more options - you can define a region on a map (l…

I don't know if it's fair to say he's copying - there's always the chance that they came up with it on their own. Are you really saying that you're the first person to come up with this idea? Anyways, I think your site is much better... thanks for sharing. This is cool.

I didn't say he copied my site directly (clearly the design is totally different), and even if he did I don't mind at all.

My site wasn't the first, http://www.globegenie.com was. I liked the concept and built an improved version.

My only point was that if you are going to take an existing idea, build something better.

Re: Show HN: Random Street View

#132

Post by mdisraeli »

There's an interesting game one can play with such sites - get a random location, and try to find your way back to an airport without looking at a map

...Of course, this was easier before google indexed so much countryside....

Re: Show HN: Random Street View

#133

Post by kirchhoff »

RogerL wrote: post #123
kirchhoff wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, well that will teach me for boasting about my site. I just did a big UI update and am ironing out the bugs. When you say 'previous image' do you mean the same image that you would see by clicking the back arrow next to the address?

Yes. playing with it a bit more, it seems when clicking in a location that does not give you the circle (to move your position) that this happens. If the circle is there it advances you along the road as it should. I am not sure, but I think it may be correlated with using the left/right arrow keys. i.e., use arrow keys to move forwards/backwards on the road, click "go" to go to the next image, and then click in the…

I'll try to reproduce the problems you mentioned. There are some keyboard shortcuts - J and K for previous and next image, and G for go. Maybe these are being triggered somehow.

When you see stop(0) it might still be searching for a Street View, especially if you're using the map.

Thanks again.

Re: Show HN: Random Street View

#135

Post by gourneau »

hanezz wrote: post #92
samolang wrote: post #77

This would make an awesome wallpaper/screen saver.

http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow

Hey Y'all on OS X. Just compile this little tool https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver

Then add the url http://randomstreetview.com/#slideshow to the url playlist of the screen saver.

Or get the binary here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c03r77x5vm1wirp/WebViewScreenSaver...

One neat feature/bug is that if you have multiple monitors the screens seem like they are pointed to different angles of the same exact place. I suspect the randomness algo is based on JS timestamps.

Re: Show HN: Random Street View

#138

Post by magicalist »

crazygringo wrote: post #94

Nice! So interesting. This is the kind of thing that, 30 years ago, you could only dream about. Stuff like this reminds me how much we take things like the Internet and Google Street View for granted, and sometimes you need to step back and think how amazing they are. But stepping forwards to a minor detail... are there keyboard shortcuts? If you click on the image, you can already use Google controls to pan/walk aro…

> But stepping forwards to a minor detail... are there keyboard shortcuts? If you click on the image, you can already use Google controls to pan/walk around using the arrow keys and +/-..., so that all works... But it would be awesome if there were another shortcut to move to the next/previous location, so I could move around, and between images, solely using the keyboard.

Left and right arrow keys rotate the view, and if you rotate so an arrow in the Street View image is close to pointing up or down, then the up and down arrow keys work for moving forward and backward between locations.

edit: actually up and down arrow keys seem to always advance to the next locations, it just seems to pick whichever direction is pointing most up or most down, respectively.

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