TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Trippish.com - Roadtrip Weather Forecasting, a Few Features Short of Great

Trippish.com executes a simple mashup to provide a very useful roadtrip planning tool, adding weather forecasts to driving directions. Using Microsoft’s Live Local, Trippish provides similar route planning features as (obviously) Microsoft, Google, and MapQuest.

On top of this, Trippish offers…

1. Weather forecasts along your route, mapped with informative icons, and showing more detail when hovered over. (picture below)
2. An “ideal start time” calculator that uses multi-day forecasts and the length of your proposed trip to determine the best start time to minimize your exposure to lousy driving conditions. The site notes (under “What is Trippish”) that the algorithm is still under refinement.

Trippish bears the beta tag, and it shows. While the core feature of adding forecasts to your route seems to work fine (I tried it out from Winnipeg to Minneapolis, which is a trip I’ll be making in a few weeks), the site is missing to features that I generally take for granted.

So, here’s 4 suggestions for Trippish as they work through their beta that would make the site an addition to my permanent bookmarks collection:

1. URL Publishing: Sharing is by email only. To get the URL above, I had to “share” the map with myself by sending myself an email from Trippish, click the link in the email, and then grab the URL.
2. Clean URL’s: The URL’s are awful. Hopefully Trippish will be adding a nice URL scheme for map “publishing” as time goes on - “trippish.com/username/spring2007″ for example.
3. Membership Features: There’s no membership features for saving your own maps. This feature has particular relevance with the weather forecasts; it would be great to check and re-check an itinerary as the departure time drew closer. Not that you can’t do it with the current setup, but a decent url-publishing service and/or membership features would add a lot of utility.
4. Ditch the Sidebar: Yargghh - the sidebar menus are horrible for navigation and info presentation, breaking every commonsense UI-design rule. Given the feature depth on the site, and good inverted “L” two-column layout would make parsing and using the site a lot simpler.

I know my parents would have appreciated Trippish in their bi-annual migration from Victoria, BC to Palm Desert, CA, and I know I’ll be checking back for that aforementioned trip to Minneapolis. Digg seemed to like it, which bodes well. In the meantime, I’ll be watching their beta progress, and watching Google’s activity to see if Trippish is about to get clobbered.

directions, maps, roatrip, travel, trippish weather

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Google: Create & Save your own GMaps

From Dave Winer - Google’s turned on a hot new feature on Google Maps - “My Maps.” You can now create, markup, save, and share your own maps.

Features include:

1. Adding lines, pushpins, polygonal shapes.
2. Public (shared w/ world via URL) or Private (in “My Maps” only) maps.
3. Add photos - though they must be stored online elsewhere.
4. Add videos - from GVideo or YouTube.
5. Add richtext pushpin/map object descriptions.
6. Export to KML for Google Earth.

I created a map of part of an annual hike that we do along some awesome beaches about an hour north of Winnipeg. The creation process was fast and intuitive.

I can see this being a very useful tool. Explaining how to get to the above hike, drop off locations, parking, and so on, just got a whole lot easier. This would be fantastic for coordinating bike clubs, photo-walks, and basically anything involving two or more people in a location that isn’t known to all participants.

Google has done a great job of leveraging thier own API; its just odd that it took them so long to do so. Now that it has happened, I imagine their are a number of API-based sites out there that will be rapidly re-thinking their value propositions.

One complaint: clean URL’s to link to would be really nice and make sharing easier than with the current mishmash of url parameters.

EDIT: Mashable has a good roundup (read through the comments too) of sites that will get toasted by this rollout, in particular Platial. And, TechMeme is pulling it all together.

EDIT: Courtesey of SearchBlog, here’s the official Google Blog post about the launch.

gmaps, google, googlemaps, maps techfold

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!