More Google Maps Mashupy Goodness...

As promised a few days ago... I present: "Bikely"

http://www.bikely.com/

First, a quick spiel from the homepage:

"Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle
routes.

It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city such as Melbourne
on a bike, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a
new destination.

But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely
makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way.
"

A few notes;
This is a really early release. It may work. It may not work at all (I
think it's broken in Opera ATM + I don't have any Macs to test on). It
may do strange things that you don't expect. In IE6 and Firefox 1.5 it
seems to work!

Please let me know of any broken things you find. In this thread will
do for now - I'll setup a feedback/bugs email address soon.

The usefulness of this idea is of course entirely dependent on how many
bike routes we get into the database over time. If this attracts a
sufficient following and we build a comprehensive network of bike paths,
then I'll be glad to throw more development time into the project and
add the necessary searching facilities and whatever other web2.0ey stuff
that makes people feel warm and fuzzy.

Anyway.. for now, enjoy and let me know what your first impressions are.

Cheers,
Jules

Jules wrote:
As promised a few days ago... I present: "Bikely"

http://www.bikely.com/

First, a quick spiel from the homepage:

"Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle
routes.

It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city such as Melbourne
on a bike, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a
new destination.

But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely
makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way.
"

A few notes;
This is a really early release. It may work. It may not work at all (I
think it's broken in Opera ATM + I don't have any Macs to test on). It
may do strange things that you don't expect. In IE6 and Firefox 1.5 it
seems to work!

Hmmmm I have some Macs at work. Remind me and I will test it for you.
THey have Safari and Firefox on em.

Awesome Jules

I've been thinking about doing a text based site like this for a while.
When Google released their maps for Aus on Friday I started work on
something like this, but didn't get a lot of time to throw at it.
You've done a great job, it's probably best if I put my time into
adding routes to yours than building another one

I found the process of adding a map and saving it required a little
guess work (I lost one map in the proces). Perhaps down the left hand
side you could put some really simple instructions. I also missed the
"Name this route" and Save button the first time around.

Looks great though.

What platform have you built it on ? ( I'm guessing Rails).

I have a couple of ideas for features I was going to add, email me if
you'd like to hear them.

Love your work

Damian (1 route added)

On Tue, 23 May 2006 12:50:11 GMT, Jules wrote:

Anyway.. for now, enjoy and let me know what your first impressions are.

Cheers,
Jules

Nice enough, but after trying several times to 'join' I kept getting a
username and password don't match, even with cookies. Makes it a rather
worthless page.

JulesGood work Jules. Easy to use, although I'm 2/3 of the way
through my
commute, and it's starting to get a little slow. I'm at about 70
points.

Yeah it does get slow unfortunately. Not sure if there's much I can do
about that, as it relies mostly on Googles API for the grunt work.

Are you using firefox? I've found that in Firefox the red line
(generated by Google's API) is actually a PNG refreshed on every change
(!!) I was slightly horrified to discover that this is how they
implemented it. In IE it uses the MS VML stuff to generate vectors on
the fly, which is obviously much much faster.

So, grudgingly, I use IE to author paths ;-(

Any chance of a elevation graph like the GMap Pedometer site?

In time ;-) I've found the data source, so it can certainly be done
reasonably easily.

Damian wrote:

I've been thinking about doing a text based site like this for a while.
When Google released their maps for Aus on Friday I started work on
something like this, but didn't get a lot of time to throw at it.
You've done a great job, it's probably best if I put my time into
adding routes to yours than building another one

Heh.. I spent about 4 days flat out on it. Need a little break from it
now ;-)

I found the process of adding a map and saving it required a little
guess work (I lost one map in the proces). Perhaps down the left hand
side you could put some really simple instructions. I also missed the
"Name this route" and Save button the first time around.

Yeah... Definitely needs refinements. There are instructions down the
LHS.. too brief you reckon?

What platform have you built it on ? ( I'm guessing Rails).

PHP actually.. on a custom framework I've used for a few projects.

I have a couple of ideas for features I was going to add, email me if
you'd like to hear them.

Will do.

Cheers,
Jules

Nice enough, but after trying several times to 'join' I kept getting a
username and password don't match, even with cookies. Makes it a rather
worthless page.


Hmmm this is a bit odd. Let's try to sort it out.

Did you successfully register an account, but couldn't log in? Or did
the registration process fail you?

What username did you (try to) register?

Cheers,
Jules

Jules wrote:

Are you using firefox? I've found that in Firefox the red line
(generated by Google's API) is actually a PNG refreshed on every change
(!!) I was slightly horrified to discover that this is how they
implemented it. In IE it uses the MS VML stuff to generate vectors on
the fly, which is obviously much much faster.

I don't know if you've read the history / updates page on the gmap
pedometer site, but he added an optimisation for longer routes that
only renders the points in the current view. Might be worth a look
into.

I used FF for the route I added, it worked fine for me.

Damian

On 2006-05-23, Jules wrote:
As promised a few days ago... I present: "Bikely"

http://www.bikely.com/

Not bad. Any chance you could modify it so it doesn't need cookies? eg:
a session number in the URL if cookies are disabled. (I habitually click
"deny" whenever I'm asked to allow cookies. I also have Flash disabled
as a matter of course, but that's beside the point. :-)

This is a really early release. It may work. It may not work at all (I
think it's broken in Opera ATM + I don't have any Macs to test on). It

I'll do some testing in Safari shortly.

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the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@" to "usenet".

Jules Wrote:

Yeah... Definitely needs refinements. There are instructions down the
LHS.. too brief you reckon?

Yes, too brief. You tend to look at the left and the map, and not
notice the title and save button at the top. For a first time user, a
detailed click by click explanation would be good. The instructions
down the left are good for reminding you what to do.

When finished enter "Name this route" and "Save".

Good work. I've added my commute.


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