Not sure I agree 100% with the productive/unproductive value system you're establishing, but I do think it's an interesting idea — how can we weight the various aspects of a trip we value (time spent, comfort, cost, environmental and community impact, etc)? Might be interesting to build a system that lets you specify how much you value each of those, and re-rank transit options accordingly?
I really like the idea of building a subway map projection based on travel time, without making you select a starting station. Might play around with force-directed graphs in d3 — meanwhile, looking forward to what you folks come up with!
It should! As far as I know, GTFS is pretty transport-mode-agnostic. (I imagine the bus stops are a bit more dense, though — it helps that the NYC map has a recognizable set of line colors that remain familiar when you jumble it all up)
You need to tap a couple times — the first tap triggers the hover state (definitely not ideal for mobile). Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to hit the same stop consistently multiple times...
The issue with using average waiting times (as opposed to picking a particular time and computing actual waiting times) is stations with multiple trains — the N, R and Q might each stop at Union Square once every 10 minutes, but if you're happy boarding any of those, then your average wait time isn't 5 minutes — it's much less.
What I might try is sampling a couple random start times (e.g. 8:00 AM, 8:03 AM, 8:22 AM) and averaging the predictions of all those.
I'm calculating travel times by simulating a rider starting from the selected stop at a specific time (for example, "weekday late night" is 3 AM, and "rush hour" is 8 AM) and "waiting" for he next scheduled train. That's why, when you select most stops during late night, the nearest stops are pretty far (~ 10 minutes) away — because that's a typical time you'd wait for a train at that time of night. It's definitely not a perfect prediction.
And yep — I really need to put some work into the mobile experience. I'm surprised it works at all!
Thanks! Turns out the MTA does keep a pretty detailed schedule (not that they manage to stick to it much, these days) in the GTFS format, so it's not hard to compute travel times client-side. As a plus, GTFS seems pretty-widely used, meaning it shouldn't be so hard to port this to other transit systems!
This. I can't find a single example of an actual UI you'd build with famo.us on their entire site. How am I supposed to know what makes the framework worth learning if I don't see examples of what it makes possible?
No particular reason. The API currently involves importing `plugin.py` files and calling functions in them, which makes it a bit simpler, but it should be possible to bridge with other languages.
I've considered using Javascript for Automation, but there isn't a huge amount of documentation around it, so it hasn't been that valuable.
It's primarily an API on which developers can build plugins in Python (though doing a lot of useful stuff actually requires calling out to Applescript, of all things). There's no visual workflow-builder like in Alfred, although you _can_ set up triggers for Automator workflows.
As a longtime iOS developer, I find the android layout system far superior for a lot of things. Before AutoLayout, things like containers that adjusted their size to fit text required reams of custom code—AutoLayout is still less intuitive and harder to reason about (though theoretically much more powerful) than Android's linear layouts, grids, etc.
Not to suggest any sort of conspiracy, but why is it that this link has (as of 4:21 EDT) 103 points, 43 comments, and was posted one hour ago, and yet is ranked 33rd on the HN homepage — meanwhile, the #1 ranked link, also from an hour ago, has only 20 points? And an 11-hour-old 13-point link is #13?
Does it have to do with the poster's karma or recently-joined status, or the linked site? I'm genuinely curious what goes into this ranking.
Creating a driver-owned replacement for Uber's service could certainly work to give drivers a better deal, but unionizing existing drivers is a better means to that end. Uber certainly adds value—they've got a good app, and it's great that I can land in a new city and know the same service will work the same way.
It's not just voice input that's severely neglected by UI designers—it's text-based interface in general. Consider his example of choosing "California" from a list of states—most people would find it way easier to just type "CA" than to scroll and hunt for "California" in a list—but how often do you see an interface that prods you to do this, or even makes apparent that it's possible? (In some web apps that use custom menus, it isn't!)
Why, when I want to apply a 10px blur in Photoshop, can't I just type "blur 10 pixels" instead of digging through 2 nested menus and a modal? WIMP interfaces are great for _discovering_ what an app can do, but terrible at letting you do a specific thing fast.
Things like spotlight and wolfram alpha are a step forward, but we're still light-years behind where we could be if we took text-based UI—or hybrid WIMP/text UI—seriously.