You may want to talk to the Infinite Cooling team out of MIT too. They do water reclamation on top of cooling towers to reduce water usage. Could be a nice channel partnership between you all! Happy to make the connect.
We do something similar for our Explore feature on MileWise, just our deals include prices in reward points. We compare current prices to historical trends to figure out if a price is a "good" option. I like Hipmunk's idea of Subscribing to specific deal feeds.
We use node+express for everything at MileWise. I put together a starter project for quickly bootstrapping new projects that's ready to go using our favorite set of tools:
We actually built the app using Appcelerator Titanium. We modified Backbone to work with Titanium's API, and were able to reuse pretty much all the Models we wrote for our web app.
If anyone's interested, I'm thinking about writing a dev post about our experience. Definite Pros and Cons, but the TL;DR is:
There's pretty much no way we would have been able to do what we did in 2 months if we had started from scratch in Obj-C.
So while we don't have a way explore flights based on say, earn maximum miles per dollar, we do sort by what ee call WisePrice - which actually does factor in the "kickback" you get from miles earned on the flight. We include any elite status or cabin class bonuses too -- and you can value miles at any rate you'd like in your preferences.
Great feedback - we weren't sure whether at this point people would have a clear idea from the homepage of what we were doing w/ the info and they'd just want to get on with things, or if they'd want more contextual explanation.
This is definitely an area for metrics and user testing, but probably better for us to err on the side of caution =)
We actually do both, and then spent a few cycles de-duping etc.
1) Part of our reason for using Node+Socket.IO is to deal with the problem of having a bunch of different sources returning data over a wide spread of time.
2) You'd be surprised about the airline sites. While they don't necessarily have the widest variety of good fares, airline will often reserve their cheapest fares for their own sites (called Last Seat Availability).
Not at all. I'm glad the iPad inherited it's core user-experience philosophy from the iPhone and iTouch - Apple has positioned the iPad as a device suited not just for entertainment but as a tool to G.S.D; a tool that is actually FUN to use.
I'm personally very excited about the potential for applications that really take advantage of touch and gesture to make more mundane tasks not only bearable but enjoyable.
Check out http://www.librivox.org. They have a HUGE catalogue of audio recordings of public-domain works. Grab a list of the 100 classic books of all time and download them. Don Quixote, The Prince, Picture of Dorian Grey, Pride and Prejudice...