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Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

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Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

tomelders wrote: post #40
pmjordan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possible bug: when entering a location, I only seem to be shown nearby airports within the same country. For locations near borders (or in small countries) it's easy to forget the nearest airport might be in the next country. Specific examples: * Vienna, Austria: Bratislava airport in Slovakia is closer than Linz or Graz * Figueres, Spain: Perpignan airport in France is closer than Barcelona's). But yeah, ver…

yup, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. I'll have to change the display from "airports in that country" to "airports within x miles", possible with a slider to adjust the radius.

You may want to leave it as an option. As I understand it, Europeans can travel freely within the EU much like Americans can travel freely between states; if an American is going to Austria, is it trivial to land in Slovakia and drive/take a train across the border? (I really don't know; haven't traveled internationally since I was a wee lad.)

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#42

Post by dagw »

culturestate wrote: post #12
piaskal wrote: post #10

This is great. Nobody ever travels from airport to airport, yet every flight search engine insists that you enter departure and destination airport names instead of places you actually want to go to. How am I supposed to know what airports are nearby a place I've never been before?

FWIW, Orbitz will allow you to search for flights by city names rather than airport codes. I'm not sure how it decides what airports serve a given city, though.

Maybe Orbitz works better in US, but I just tried it with a small selection of English towns and it basically failed spectacularly. flightm8 on the other hand would happily tell me the nearest airport to Leatherhead and Whitby.

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#43

Post by chrislomax »

I like it and I didn't find the interface at all confusing. For about 10 seconds I wondered what to do but picked it up

Like it overall, good project to say you have not completed it.

I'm always in a state of whether something is worth doing when someone as big as Google goes into the same sector but I think you are far enough along to make it a useful application.

I presume you monetize the application from airline referrals?

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#44

Post by AdamGibbins »

tomelders wrote: post #38
bambax wrote: post #36

Interesting; it did show me some airports and airlines I had never heard of, and I might check them out! You definitely should pick it up again! --- For some reason "Airlinair" which is a French regional airline, redirects to "Airkenya" which is apparently the national airline of Kenya.

Bug noted and entered into my state of the art bug tracking system.... a text file on my desktop.

I search for Heathrow to SFO, click "Get Prices" for the British Airways flight - and it redirects me to http://localhost/error.html

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#45

Post by tomelders »

chrislomax wrote: post #43

I like it and I didn't find the interface at all confusing. For about 10 seconds I wondered what to do but picked it up Like it overall, good project to say you have not completed it. I'm always in a state of whether something is worth doing when someone as big as Google goes into the same sector but I think you are far enough along to make it a useful application. I presume you monetize the application from airline…

That was the original plan, but that wouldn't really generate much income. I did plan to add hotels, and hotel referrals pay very handsomely.

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#46

Post by Sukotto »

Great idea, I think it could be really useful.

I'd like it even more if you decrease the focus on the giant map and instead have a little form like

  +--------------------------------+
  |  Leaving from: ______________  |
  |                                |
  |      Going to: ______________  |
  |                                |
  |                     [Show me]  |
  +--------------------------------+
Let me put in, for example, Vancouver, Canada and New York City

Show me a mini map for my end points and let the rest of the screen show what flights I can take. Maybe with some controls to let me filter on things like "what car rental my company uses", "time on train from airport to city center".

Let me pick specific airports... but don't force me to.

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#47

Post by chrislomax »

tomelders wrote: post #45
chrislomax wrote: post #43

I like it and I didn't find the interface at all confusing. For about 10 seconds I wondered what to do but picked it up Like it overall, good project to say you have not completed it. I'm always in a state of whether something is worth doing when someone as big as Google goes into the same sector but I think you are far enough along to make it a useful application. I presume you monetize the application from airline…

That was the original plan, but that wouldn't really generate much income. I did plan to add hotels, and hotel referrals pay very handsomely.

Well good luck with it. I'm in the process of scoping the market to find somewhere I can make some money. At the minute I'm looking at selling actual product but I like service software as it can be a lot "cooler" than selling products.

You got some good functionality in there, I like being able to select multiple airports very easily and I like the UI.

Sure, there are some aspects of it you could improve but in a lot of ways I am surprised you even needed to ask whether it was worth pursuing as it appears you have put a lot of hard work in already.

I would certainly use it and I would also recommend others using it once everything is back up to date too.

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#48

Post by Nicknameless »

I'm generally pretty optimistic but I feel that I should push back against the crowd a little here. Plenty of people say "I'd use it", but who will say "I'll pay for it"?

If you're not in it for the money, are you sure it's the most interesting, inspiring or needed tool/app you could be working on, given that it seems the competition may take care of this need anyway?

I've learnt the hard way that you shouldn't let sunk costs of a project sway your decision to carry on with it.

All the best whatever you decide.

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#49

Post by JoeAltmaier »

tomelders wrote: post #7
illdave wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's something in that - how come you're running into the problem so frequently? Is the main use case that you're looking for something like people that look for flights to X and don't realise that they could save money by going to Y which is a short drive away? (E.g. a flight to Gatwick, when they could save 50% by going to Heathrow).

That's mainly it. Also, most 'airports' are near cities, but most 'places' in the world aren not cities, but are slap bang in the middle of two, three or even four cities. So which airports serve Stoke on Trent? or Schweinfurt? or Alcanar? Choosing airports for those locations is really something only a human can decide. I may well travel 150 miles from an airport to my destination if it's really important, but that'…

Same problem: Google search from CID (Iowa) to Columbus OH turned up - no flights! Really?

Your search - same problem. Am I doing something wrong?

Re: Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

#50

Post by tomelders »

AdamGibbins wrote: post #44
tomelders wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bug noted and entered into my state of the art bug tracking system.... a text file on my desktop.

I search for Heathrow to SFO, click "Get Prices" for the British Airways flight - and it redirects me to http://localhost/error.html

bug, noted, cheers.
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