

A Better Way To Travel - kirillzubovsky
http://www.onthewayapp.com/

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daveschappell
This was a fun week's worth of work for Team TeachStreet. Felt good to get
everybody working on a single project (we've spent many months working on lots
of different areas of the site, and working with different partners). It was
really refreshing, and you could almost 'feel' morale climb, as we all had a
chance to just have fun for a few days!

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Schultzy
As a lover of road trips, I really dig what you're doing.

If I may offer two observations:

1) I would appreciate some sort of filter to hide multi-location stops like
Sub-way, Exxon, etc. If you are going to have such data at all, I would
appreciate the ability to hide it. I can find a gas station by reading the
highway signs, but it's not as easy to find the super unique and interesting
stops.

2) Scaling the page to see more of the map makes the text very difficult to
read.

Anyways, pretty darn good for a week. Thanks for sharing!

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joesunga
@schultzy: thanks a ton for the feedback. here are my responses to each
observation:

1\. that makes a ton of sense. adding filtering in the future was something we
were thinking about and we'll add this suggestion into that list.

2\. you can always zoom the window in closer, but we'll look at making the
text on the map more readable.

thanks again. :)

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hugh3
Hmmm. Well, the "places of interest" it suggested to me didn't look
interesting, but it's _nearly_ useful. What it _really_ needs is just to have
a "time" column estimating how far each stop is from the last one.

Maybe I just grew up watching too many NSW RTA ads, but I'm a firm believer in
the principle that for safety you should stop and get out of the car every two
hours. So if it could suggest stops which were spaced roughly two hours apart,
it'd be useful to me.

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joesunga
That's funny you say that. The "time" situation was something we struggled
with to find what the best experience would be. The questions we had were:

\- Do you stop 1 hour all the time when you stop at a restaurant? What if you
take it to-go?

\- What if you stop at a stop like the World's Largest Frying Pan for just 5
minutes? Should we allow users to add custom time limits for each of the
stops?

\- Would we be complicating things adding custom times?

All great questions and things for us to think about. Thanks a ton for the
feedback.

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hugh3
I'd only want an estimate of the travel times between destinations, not an
estimate of how long I'd actually spend stopped at each (which I wouldn't
attempt to estimate in advance anyway).

For me the use case is this: I want to drive from (say) San Francisco to
Denver, and want to plan out a schedule which involves stopping every two
hours for a break.

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joesunga
Ahhh...got it. Thanks for clarifying that.

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matdwyer
Cool idea, but I'm not driving 10 miles out of the way to get to KFC/Taco
Bell.

I don't think this should feature restaurants but rather "things to do",
hiking trails, look outs, maybe specific food places (local legends, etc) but
specifically things that "make up communities" (I think of like college
football towns, etc)

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joesunga
Totally agree. Our first pass was to pull in location information from Google
Places and Foursquare, but we feel the beauty of something like this would be
the unique locations like you mentioned above.

Thanks a ton for the feedback.

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madiator
Very nice project! And this is the kind of thing I always want to do: stop at
weird little fun places on the way. I wish I had it when I did a cross-country
trip. Looks like I had missed a few scenic drives and what not!

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joesunga
that's exactly what got us super excited about it. we didn't want to miss any
of those cool unique place when we were going on a drive anywhere.

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kodablah
FYI, when there are multiple possible routes (e.g. the second when going from
Dallas, TX to Surprise, AZ) and you choose one that isn't the default, the
"Featured Stops" still show for the default.

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joesunga
@kodablah: thanks for finding that bug. a couple of folks have notified us
about that, and we're working to resolve it as we speak. cheers!

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mea36
You should try pulling from <http://www.roadsideamerica.com/> That's my go to
site to road trip info.

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zacharycohn
I'm getting an error when going from Seattle to Yakima, it says: "Your
geographic boundary is too big. Please search a smaller area."

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zacharycohn
I'm actually getting that error 100% of the time. I tested Seattle to Redmond,
and then I tested a specific address to another specific address, both in
Belltown.

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joesunga
@zacharycohn: thanks for letting us know. we're looking into it as we speak.
hold please. :)

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TheIronYuppie
This is really cool - I can totally see using this!

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joesunga
thanks! we're looking to add more unique location data to make the experience
even better.

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porfirio
"Featured Stops Starbucks (Coffee Shop) In-N-Out Burger (Burgers) Chevron (Gas
Station / Garage) McDonald's (Fast Food) Jack in the Box (Fast Food) Los Pinos
Mexican Restaurant (Mexican) Six Flags Magic Mountain (Theme Park) Westfield
Valencia Town Center (Mall) Chick-fil-A (Fast Food) Porto's Bakery & Cafe
(Bakery) Universal Studios Hollywood (Theme Park) IKEA (Furniture / Home)"

First page of results. LA to SF. Next page includes "IN THE MIDDLE OF F#%~*?¥!
NOWHERE!!! (Farm)"

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joesunga
@porfirio: Thanks a lot for trying it out. We're currently pulling in data
from various sources like Foursquare, Google Places, etc. -- but we do add
unique stops as well. Currently we've filled out unique stops for the PNW
(since we're based here), but CA is definitely one we'd like to tackle soon.

