Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#21

Post by justinwi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 8:32 PM UTC

Adaptive wrote: post #17

justinwi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. It should get your location from the network if GPS isn't working. Will look into it. Yeah, place lookups are really rough now - that's really high on our priority list. Forthcoming version versions will be much better. Thanks again.

Props for dealing with the feedback in this thread so quickly and sorry for turning HN into a low fidelity bug tracker. I promise to submit future bug reports in a more useful manner. Fwiw, folks, this is staying on my phone. One of the great things about the android marketplace is I can expect this will be updated sooner rather than later.

+1 for the lack of friction in the Android Marketplace.

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#22

Post by srik » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 9:10 PM UTC

You should have a privacy policy if you're going to collect emails, even if its for something as simple as a waiting list.

It would make people who signup feel secure about giving you their emails and as we all know people who have explicitly signed up are probably gonna have a better chance of being your potential customers.

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#23

Post by justinwi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 9:33 PM UTC

srik wrote: post #22

You should have a privacy policy if you're going to collect emails, even if its for something as simple as a waiting list. It would make people who signup feel secure about giving you their emails and as we all know people who have explicitly signed up are probably gonna have a better chance of being your potential customers.

Good call, thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can come up basic privacy agreement. Thanks.

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#24

Post by justinwi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 9:36 PM UTC

ynniv wrote: post #20

Thought of this one a while ago. Some of my thoughts: - How will you know where I am? It would be expensive to run my phone's GPS continuously to figure this out. - My car might not be immediately available. The time it takes to get to the car will have little or nothing to do with my GPS distance from it. - Parking can take a significant amount of time. - Traffic estimates are often wrong, sometimes greatly underest…

Thanks for sharing. Our take:

- We try to only run GPS when your next calendar event is coming up.

- Right now we have an application-wide setting that says, "Add X minutes to my travel time." We're hoping people will use that to accommodate the fact that they have to walk to their car, find parking, etc. Eventually we'll make this configurable for each event.

- Yeah, traffic estimates aren't 100% accurate, but they're better than crossing your fingers and hopping in the car. :)

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#25

Post by shazow » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 9:54 PM UTC

patrickod wrote: post #8

jonschwartz wrote: post #2

Couple of quick thoughts after installing: 1) It appears to be continuously getting GPS data. That will kill my battery. Dead battery = I'm late anyway I may need to uninstall until this is fixed. 2) I don't need to be reminded of everything on every calendar I have access to. Have it so I can select which calendar I need to bounce for. 3) Along the same lines of 2, allow me to ignore specific events. I subscribe to…

With regards to issue #1. The drain of numerous applications using the GPS hardware on the phone and thus killing battery life makes me wish Google Latitude had an API that devs could use to request my GPS co-ordinates. If you can login via Facebook why can't you do location via Latitude ?

http://code.google.com/apis/latitude/

I haven't looked at it super closely, but could the interested parties let me know what's missing? I'll forward your feedback to the right people.

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#26

Post by patrickod » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 10:03 PM UTC

shazow wrote: post #25

patrickod wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to issue #1. The drain of numerous applications using the GPS hardware on the phone and thus killing battery life makes me wish Google Latitude had an API that devs could use to request my GPS co-ordinates. If you can login via Facebook why can't you do location via Latitude ?

http://code.google.com/apis/latitude/ I haven't looked at it super closely, but could the interested parties let me know what's missing? I'll forward your feedback to the right people.

I don't know how I missed this. Everything I was thinking seems to be included. The only potential feature that it lacks is access to information on users other than myself, such as would be available through the web interface. I can see numerous reasons, however, as to why Google would not expose this information through an API.

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#27

Post by squarecat » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 11:01 PM UTC

Great idea. Here's what I've observed:

1) Way over-estimated the "time to bounce" for an event. It happened to be just over an hour from occurring and when I changed the start time to "manually" account for rough travel time, a more reasonable Bounce time was suggested.

2) Throws "unrecognizable event location" for a typical address (which Google Calendar takes no issue with): Location Name, Street Address, City, ST ZIP

(Wanted to see if back-to-back events made recommendation based on being at the preceding event location, but... see previous error)

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#28

Post by schiffmand » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 11:21 PM UTC

We built this same APP at Startup Weekend Boston two weeks ago, but didn't release it because we still wanted to finalize some features. Nice to know we have copycats.

Also: The data provided by Bing's API was minimal, this app won't be accurate. There is also the issue of how do you know where I am leaving from in the future?

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#29

Post by justinwi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 11:36 PM UTC

schiffmand wrote: post #28

We built this same APP at Startup Weekend Boston two weeks ago, but didn't release it because we still wanted to finalize some features. Nice to know we have copycats. Also: The data provided by Bing's API was minimal, this app won't be accurate. There is also the issue of how do you know where I am leaving from in the future?

Rest assured, this was rolling around in our heads longer than two weeks ago, and we had no idea a SW team had tried to build something like this.

Not that, that would have changed anything anyway... :)

Re: Show HN: GPS + Calendar + Traffic = always on time

#30

Post by justinwi » Mon, Mar 05, 2012, 11:39 PM UTC

squarecat wrote: post #27

Great idea. Here's what I've observed: 1) Way over-estimated the "time to bounce" for an event. It happened to be just over an hour from occurring and when I changed the start time to "manually" account for rough travel time, a more reasonable Bounce time was suggested. 2) Throws "unrecognizable event location" for a typical address (which Google Calendar takes no issue with): Location Name, Street Address, City, ST…

Thanks for the feedback!

Can I get the address that was giving Bounce trouble? We'll take a look.