taxime

I was checking Twitter this morning and to my surprise, a few of my friends had told me that they heard taxime.ca on CBC radio this morning.  That’s good news!  Free advertising is always good.  I’d like to thank Jith Paul for mentioning it – I’m glad you find it useful Jith!  Not long after the interview Jith had sent me a link to CBC.ca where I could download the interview on CBC’s website or Mac users can download an mp3 version here.

It’s been awhile since the last update so I thought I would barge in here and make one. Tampa (Florida) is now a supported city! So if you’re doing an estimation for Tampa, you can skip entering the city and state if you use http://tampa.taxime.ca/.

For those who don’t know, I’m living in France with my girlfriend for a few months and we are blogging about our adventures at http://www.wheninfrance.ca/.  I’ve been pretty tied up in client work here but a taxime redesign is on my to-do list.  I can’t say that it will be anytime soon but it’s on the list!  The iPhone app is also on hold for now.

We’ve been spending quite some time on building our new REST API. Along with coming close to finishing that, meant that we could redo the mobile version using it. Instead of the mobile view just throwing an error when it can’t find a location, it will attempt to provide suggestions like the TaxiMe homepage.

The mobile version now gives a cab contact upon a successful estimation! HOORAY!
Since we’ve added a significant amount of features to the generic mobile version and are working on an iPhone app, we’ve decided to take down the iPhone layout on the website.
Check back to read about our progress on the iPhone app!

Thank you everyone for the enormous amount of support you’ve given us throughout our rapid growth. We’ve recently been featured in the following design galleries: CSS Mania, CSS Design Yorkshire, Most Inspired, Best CSS Gallery, Stumbleupon, CSS Cookie, CSS Impress and many others.

Some people have been blogging about us at: Addictive Tips, Startup Meme, Killer Startups, Ottawa Blogspot, New York City Events, Ace Startups, Colorado Springs Newspaper, Startup Ottawa and many others.

We’ve also added a few more cities since the last post, http://santarosa.taxime.ca/ and http://denver.taxime.ca/

We’ve just finished making TaxiMe a little smarter. Now if you’re unsure of the address of the place you’re trying to get to but you know the name, go ahead and type that in.

Example: “Quiznos Ottawa” or “Burger King Vancouver”. TaxiMe will then show a list of 4 possibile addresses. At the moment Google only lets you show the first 4 but we are working on ways around this.

Unfortunately, the searching by business only works on the website and the iPhone. We will have it working for generic mobiles shortly.

A bug has also been squashed (previous post). Now, this only occured on some addresses but if you searched “90 Queen St, Ottawa”, TaxiMe would give a “Did you mean” prompt with a list of the same addresses below. Once you clicked on it, it would just loop and ask you the same question. The problem is that Google sees 4 possibilities for “90 Queen St” in the Ottawa area so you need to go a little more in depth with which one you want. The fix: if you click on one, you will now see that the input has been populated with latitude/longitude co-ordinates. This seems to work.

I had gotten a phone call today with a bug report when you searched something like

From: 10 Albert St, Regina
To: 55 Montreal St, Regina

TaxiMe would come back and say “Did you mean…”

After providing support for major Canadian cities, we’ve just added support for 7 more American cities! View all supported cities here

It’s been a long week so far: working full time, researching taxi rates and tweaking/adding new features. Well this one is one that I know a lot of you have been waiting for.

Now if you type in your starting point and we support the rate for that city, TaxiMe will automatically adjust the fare settings. I know some of you live in the cities that aren’t supported, so I’ve offered a temporary solution until the list grows. If you know the rates in your city you can click on “Adjust fare settings”, punch in your rates, check off “Use custom rate” and click save.

The neat thing about this is that if your city isn’t supported, take Scarborough for example, TaxiMe will attempt to find a city in that province/region and use that fare. In this case, it will use Toronto’s fare. It looks at all the cities in that province/region and uses the fares of whichever city is closest to the one you typed in!

Click here for a list of all supported cities.

Over the past few days I’ve been compiling a list of rates for different cities. These will include major cities in the US and most capital cities in Canada. If you search “232 Thomas St, New York, NY” it will check to see if there is a rate for New York and then automatically adjust it for you.

This will take a bit of time but I will be releasing a list of the cities that will be supported. If you know the taxi rates in your city and it’s not listed here, shoot me an email and I’ll put it up.

The next feature on the list is support for mobiles! God it feels good to say that. The original idea of taxime.ca was to target mobile users specifically, now it feels like we’re getting closer to that.

For the geeks: The reason I hadn’t implemented it before is because Google only offers a javascript API for GDirections and most cell phones don’t support javascript. I have recently found a way to get around this – hopefully it’s legal :s

This morning has been an exciting one, Tracey Tong from the Metro decided to write an article about Taxi Me. The article can be found here http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/local/article/155596

It’s a nice article but she forgot to mention that I work with the lovely folks over at 76design.